Availability Heuristic
We judge likelihood by how easily examples come to mind.
The availability heuristic is a mental shortcut that relies on immediate examples that come to a given person's mind when evaluating a specific topic, concept, method or decision. We tend to overestimate the probability of events that are vivid or recently experienced and underestimate events that are harder to recall. Plane crashes feel more deadly than car accidents because they dominate headlines, even though statistically the opposite is true.
What it looks like in the wild.
- Politics Crime Panic Voters overestimate crime rates after a high-profile murder case because the vivid event is easily recalled.
- Everyday life Plane Fear People fear flying more than driving despite driving being statistically far more dangerous.
Someone has already built a business on this.
Biases are not only private errors. They are design targets — patterns deliberately engineered into interfaces because they reliably work.
- Algorithms and feeds Recency Flooding Social media algorithms surface emotionally charged recent events repeatedly, inflating users' perceived frequency of those events to drive engagement.
Recognising a definition is not the same skill as spotting it.
Two scenarios from the app, with distractors drawn from the same family of biases — which is what makes them hard.
After hearing about a friend's divorce, a newlywed becomes anxious about their own marriage, even though their relationship shows none of the warning signs mentioned in the story.
After hearing about a friend's bad experience with online dating, a person decides to never use dating apps, even though millions of successful relationships have started through those exact same platforms annually.
Biases rarely arrive alone.
Understand more. Assume less.
188 biases, 18,869 scenarios, and a record of how you actually decide.
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