Availability heuristic

Availability heuristic

When you ask people how often they think deaths happen from disease compared to deaths from homicide, the average person answers that they're around equally common (Lichtenstein et al 1978), but in reality disease is 16 times as common as homicide (in the USA).

What happened?

A problem is: you base your subjective feeling of "what's common" on how often you've heard about something. The media overreports homicide and underreports disease-related death.

This is the availability heuristic: a cognitive bias based on how readily something comes to memory. How available it is in your mind.

Debiasing

Just reading correct statistics doesn't stick in memory as well unless you care a lot about the topic. Even then, every it's only a patch for a specific fact. What are some general ways to debias here?

Avoid exposure to selective reporting, or counterweight it somehow.

  1. Avoid the news
  2. Talk to a broad variety of people?
  3. Always put numbers in context
  4. Understand why today's world is not like the ancestral environment, when there was at most one layer of selective reporting between you & the event itself. You either saw the event yourself, or you heard it from someone who saw it.
    • Also crucial: you knew everyone. So it was not only less of a game of telephone, there was also a more relevant "sampling frame" for your reference class
    • Echoes how Inferential distance works
  5. Get less-filtered info (not info passed thru six successive bloggers)
  6. Get in the habit of paying attention to the provenance of the information, since that determines whether or not it is information at all. Concretely:
    • Track what you've been told by a third party vs. what you've been told from the source. 1/5 of the world live on $1 per day, but they don't write 1/5 of blog posts in your feed, so what do you know about them?
    • Track what kind of sampling frame surfaced this information to you
    • Track whether you were looking for the information, or received it unasked-for

The inverse effect

Events that have never happened are not recalled, leading to an absurdity bias against those. Flood insurance! People don't buy flood insurance when it hasn't been flooding.

Burton et al. report that when dams and levees are built, they reduce the frequency of floods, and thus apparently create a false sense of security, leading to reduced precautions.2 While building dams decreases the frequency of floods, damage per flood is afterward so much greater that average yearly damage increases.

  • The opposite of availability heuristic is absurdity bias.

What links here

Created (2 years ago)