Cognitive biases: why a smart brain makes the same mistakes every time
Availability bias: why a vivid story beats the statistics
A report on thousands of cars says which model breaks down less often. One scary story from a neighbour still outweighs it, and it feels like good sense.
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1
That evening, you find a report on thousands of cars. Cars like the grey one on Rono's lot break down less often than cars like the yellow one, for the same price.
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2
Miva does not even read it. She remembers last winter: her neighbour's grey car, stopped on the highway, smoke coming out of the hood. "No grey car for me."
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One story she can see weighs more than thousands of cars on a page. Her brain judges how likely a breakdown is by how easily an example comes to mind. This is the availability bias.
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4
And what comes to mind easily is not what happens often. It is what was loud, recent or close to you. Nobody tells the story of a car that started every morning.
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5
The grey car is out, and Miva still wants the yellow one, the car the report warns about. Tonight she will search the internet to be sure. But if her memory can bend her sense of the odds, can she trust her own search?
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Quick check
In English, which are more common: words that start with K, or words with K as their third letter? And why does one feel more common?
Show the answer
Words that start with K feel more common, because they come to mind easily: you can search your memory by first letter. In a typical English text, words with K as the third letter are about twice as common.
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Go further
The shortcut behind the bias has its own name.