Availability Bias
Availability Bias
December 1, 2020
The world has certainly become a more violent place, hasn’t it? As I write this in late November, conflict in Afghanistan seems to be escalating, there is news of civil war in Ethiopia, and, closer to home, a spate of shootings across the nation. Yikes! Things are getting worse, right?
Well, no, not if one takes a careful look at the data. For example, Steven Pinker, in his book The Better Angels of our Nature, argues that violence in the world has declined over time, including here in the United States. To verify this claim, I looked at some of the most relevant numbers. From 1991 to 2018, violent crime in the U.S. declined from 758 incidents per 100,000 people to 369, a reduction of more than 50%! Assaults have declined more than 42% over the same period.(1)
And not only are bad things in decline, but good things are on the rise. In Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think, Hans Rosling shows that, across the world, the number of girls getting at least a basic education is increasing. The number of children getting vaccinations is also increasing. And the number of people living above the extreme poverty line is increasing.
So why are we inclined to think that the world is deteriorating? The answer is something called “availability bias”. Daniel Kahneman in Thinking, Fast and Slow, provides this definition: “People tend to assess the relative importance of issues by the ease with which they are retrieved from memory.” Note: this is not merely a claim that some memories are more easily retrievable (which seems obvious), but that they also get disproportionate weight in shaping our view of the world. And what determines which memories are most easily retrieved? Kahneman says: the extent of coverage in the dominant, traditional media – which of course then spills over into social media.
Traditional media outlets have been subject to a lot of criticism lately, but Kahneman’s assertion makes sense if you think about the incentives faced by journalists and their bosses. To keep subscribers, and find new ones, there is intense pressure on reporters to produce eye-catching material. And that often can mean a focus on the sensational, or close to it. The old newsroom saw “If it bleeds, it leads” remains as true today as a century ago. “Boring” good-news stories, such as a statistical decline in violence, rarely make it “above the fold” – or prior to one click-through or more on a news website. (I do realize that many people get their news only from social media these days, but I would argue that much of the news that these media highlight is reworked from a traditional media source. In any case, stay with me on this for now.)
The tendency to always highlight bad news leads to misperceptions about relative risks that can directly affect our lives. For example, research has shown that death by physical accidents is perceived to be more likely than death by strokes, but strokes kill twice as many people as accidents.(2) Misperceptions like this can lead to bad decisions. For example, it is well documented that—per mile—driving is much more dangerous than flying. But after the 9-11 attacks, which involved commercial airliners, people opted to drive more and fly less. The consequence? One estimate is that there were an additional 1600 driving deaths in the year following attributable to the increase in driving.(3)
For one generation, the stock market crash of 1929 and the subsequent Depression of the 1930s was a vivid, and hence available, memory. This generation became very wary of the stock market, invested quite conservatively (often just putting money in a bank account), and did not participate substantially in the subsequent run up in stock prices. I suspect that there has been a similar, although probably less dramatic, effect for those who remember the financial crisis of 2008—an event not easily forgotten.
As if all of this is not bad enough news, paying a lot of attention to “fear-based media” can lead to depression.(4)
What can you do to combat availability bias? The first step, as with all biases, is awareness that it exists and that you are subject to it. You can then use this awareness to reflect on the memories to which you pay attention. You might ask, “This memory is certainly vivid, but is it important?” Note that many beliefs based on memories can be easily researched. Which do you think leads to more deaths worldwide—shark bites or lightning strikes?
You can also control which news you consume and how much of it. Try to be consciously selective of the news sources you choose to consume: there is a lot more choice out there these days. Put some effort into finding sources that do not always focus on the negative or sensational, instead of just reaching for the most “available” ones. And consider reducing your screen/consumption time overall, admittedly a challenge in these pandemic times. Know that social media tend to be sensationalistic. “YouTube videos which make absurdist, wishful points…are plucked from the field of what is more reasonable and appear as top results of searches… and as links on other platforms.” (emphasis added—it is not just YouTube!).(5)
In sum, availability bias leads to the path-of-least-resistance approach to news consumption, and that leads to a distorted world view. And a distorted world view leads to bad decisions. Better to think like a statistician or scientist or even an economist (at least some of them). Overcoming any bias takes effort, but better decisions are the payoff.
“Rating the Risks,” Paul Slovic, Baruch Fischhoff, and Sarah Lichtenstein in Societal Risk Assessment, How Safe is Safe Enough?, R. Schwing & W. Albers, Jr., (Eds.) Plenum Press, New York, 1980.
Gigerenzer, G. (2004). Dread risk, September 11, and fatal traffic accidents. Psychological Science, 15(4), 286–287.
https://dailynexus.com/2017-12-28/sensationalism-in-social-media/