Availability Heuristic

The airplane is speeding up and preparing to take off, and you can’t stop imagining it blowing up or being taken over by terrorists. You sweat and worry during the whole flight. Eventually it lands, and you are finally able to relax, get into the taxi, and drive home.

Of course, now the odds of you of dying are 19 times higher, because statistically car accidents are way more common causes of death than airplanes.

But you get most of your information about disasters from news, and traffic accidents are simply not newsworthy enough to report, so you see way more stories about people dying in airplanes, and start intuitively feeling like they are more likely to happen.

We judge how common something is based on how easy it is to remember. Because of that, we overestimate the probability of more recent or more dramatic events, and underestimate the probability of things that are less vivid in our minds.

Because of that we make many mistakes, and act irrationally.

• People are afraid of snakes and spiders, but keep smoking and eating unhealthy.
• US government spends 2 times more money on fighting terrorism than on fighting cancer, even though cancer has way more victims.
• People feel that the level of crime keeps rising, even though it’s at all time low.
• People feel unsuccessful when they compare themselves to rich and famous people, who are way more prominent on tv and media.
• If media would report on people who lost their money playing lottery as much as it talks about winners, there would be less people playing.

We also significantly underestimate the probability of things that haven’t happened yet, but are likely to happen in the future. If natural disasters haven’t happened in your town in the past ten years, you are much less likely to take them seriously and take precautions.

To correct these errors, we need to study statistics and rely on data instead of our intuitions.