You can’t pretend—to yourself—that you have enough domain knowledge to make The lesson here is that if you have just enough information to make a dangerous decision, you probably will.People in power (or who feel powerful) are more likely to rely on ease-of-recall when making a decision.In one experiment, researchers asked business travelers passing through a busy airport to generate either two or six arguments for sending people to Mars. (You’re bound to see more pictures of people windsurfing, eating an incredible meal, or having fun with their kinds than sitting on their couch on a Friday night bored out of their minds.
This rate holds whether there’s a natural disaster or not.

The availability heuristic can be used to produce assessments of class frequency or event probability based on how easily instances of the class or event can be mentally retrieved (e.g., plane crashes may seem like a frequent cause of death because it is easy to recall examples) or constructed (via the simulation heuristic). That’s because the product category—not just a single company’s product recall—becomes more available in the mind of both consumers who buy that kind of product and in the minds of investors who buy the company’s stock.In perhaps the oddest example of the effect of the availability heuristic on a company’s stock performance is the Anne Hathaway effect. While everyone found producing more arguments harder than producing few arguments, happier people found it harder—which made happy people less likely than sad people to agree that the number of years of schooling should be reduced. For example, people may judge easily imaginable risks such as terrorist attacks or airplane crashes as more likely than the […] When we estimate a date, an important clue is how easy to remember something happened: if it’s easy to remember, it must have happened recently. Even Hurricane Katrina didn’t change the average policy length over the long term.The same phenomenon occurred after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. But recalling two events in the distant past is barely easier than recalling ten events in the distant past, which means the easy-it-true bias doesn’t have the same effect.We’ve already seen how shark attacks are more likely to prevent us from going to the beach than risks from falling coconuts because they come to mind more easily. If you pay for flood insurance year after year without experiencing a flood, you’ll question whether flood insurance is a necessary expense. That’s because “when people have more offline interactions with their friends, knowing more stories about others’ lives, both positive and negative, they are less persuaded that others are happier than themselves.”So far, we have shown how the availability heuristic is the shortcut that confuses If you were an assertive person, it would be easy to think of examples of your assertiveness.
Everyone is susceptible to substituting Let’s take a look at why each of these conditions leads you to rely on ease-of-recall and make you more likely to use the availability heuristic.In one study, participants were given lists of 15 words and later asked to recall them. Only (This phenomenon explains why, after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, the stock price of major insurance companies climbed even as the companies took a financial hit from insurance payouts. When a company issues a product recall, investors sell their stock, driving the share price down. And the numbers went up for smaller water districts. Except for this time, they didn’t ask how often people ate out in the previous four months. When they recalled two details from the bombing (easy! Hide Here are a few examples:When the researchers took a closer look at the data, they noticed when were presented with two causes of death, people usually guessed which cause was more likely, even though they rarely guessed the correct ratio.Third, when a cause of death had a 2:1 ratio or more–or, when one cause of death was at least twice as likely as the other–people could identify it as being more frequent. Your perceived frequency is based on how easily instances of words that start with In another one of Tversky and Kahneman’s thought experiments, they asked people to guess the likelihood of an imaginary couple getting a divorce.How would you go about making such a guess? What is your risk for cancer? Later that day, you were feeling lucky, so you bought a Lotto 6/49 ticket with a $40 million jackpot prize.Because of the documentary, you figured you had a decent chance of winning—after all, those people won, and they were regular people like you before buying that lucky ticket. One study indicates depression affects 6.5% of adults in a given year, and the lifetime risk for experiencing depression is 13% for males and 20 to 25% for females.However, when people are exposed to frequent ads to antidepressants, they estimate that 38% of adults experience depression each year.This causes unnecessary stress. At 10 parts per billion, it’s 1 in 500.The new mandate didn’t come without a cost. Acts of violence? It prompts people to get unnecessary medical care or be prescribed medication they don’t need. And the numbers went up for smaller water districts. Or you’ll remember the time you slept on the floor because you couldn’t get a flight until the next morning.