12/30/21, 11:51 AM Availability Heuristic - Biases & Heuristics | The Decision Lab

What is the availability heuristic?

The availability heuristic describes our tendency to use information that comes to mind quickly and easily when making decisions
about the future.

Where it occurs
Imagine you are considering either John or Jane, two employees at your company, for a promotion. Both
have a steady employment record, though Jane has been the highest performer in her department during
her tenure. However, in Jane’s first year, she unwittingly deleted a company project when her computer
crashed. The vivid memory of having lost that project likely weighs more heavily on the decision to
promote Jane than it should. This is due to the availability heuristic, which suggests that singular
memorable moments have an outsized influence on decisions.

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Suggestibility

Individual effects
The availability heuristic can lead to bad decision-making because memories that are easily recalled are
frequently insufficient for figuring out how likely things are to happen again in the future. Ultimately, this
leaves the decision-maker with low-quality information to form the basis of their decision.

Group effects
Exploring the availability heuristic leads to troubling conclusions across many different academic and
professional areas. If each one of us analyzes information in a way that prioritizes memorability and
nearness over accuracy, then the model of a rational, logical chooser, which is predominant in economics
as well as many other fields, can be flawed at times. The implications of the availability heuristic suggest
that many academics, policy-makers, business leaders, and media figures have to revisit their basic
assumptions about how people think and act in order to improve the quality and accuracy of their work.

Why it happens
A heuristic is a ‘rule-of-thumb’, or a mental shortcut, that helps guide our decisions. When we make a
decision, the availability heuristic makes our choice easier. However, the availability heuristic challenges our
ability to accurately judge the probability of certain events, as our memories may not be realistic models
for forecasting future outcomes.1

For example, if you were about to board a plane, how would you go about calculating the probability that
you would crash? Many different factors could impact the safety of your flight, and trying to calculate them
all would be very difficult. Provided you didn’t google the relevant statistics, your brain may do something
else to satisfy your curiosity. In fact, many of us do this on an everyday basis.

Your brain uses shortcuts

Your brain could use a common mental shortcut by drawing upon the information that most easily comes
to mind. Perhaps you had just read a news article about a massive plane crash in a nearby country. The
memorable headline, paired with the image of a wrecked plane wreathed in flames, left an easily recalled
impression, which causes you to wildly overrate the chance that you’ll be involved in a similar crash. This is
the availability heuristic bias at work.

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The availability heuristic exists because some memories and facts are spontaneously retrieved, whereas
others take effort and reflection to be recalled. Certain memories are automatically recalled for two main
reasons: they appear to happen often or they leave a lasting imprint on our minds.

Certain memories are recalled easier than others

Those that appear to happen often generally coincide with other shortcuts we use to comprehend our
world. This is seen with a study that Tversky and Kahneman, two pioneers of behavioral science, conducted
in 1973.2 They asked participants whether more words begin with the letter K or if more words have K as
their third letter.

Even though a typical text contains twice as many words in which K is the third letter rather than the first,
70% of the participants said that more words begin with K. This is because it is much easier for people to
think of words that begin with K (e.g., kitchen, kangaroo, kale, etc) than words that have K as the third
letter (e.g., ask, cake, biking). Since words that begin with K are easier to think of, it seems like there are
more of them.

Other events leave a lasting impression, which primes their chance of recall when we make decisions.
Tversky and Kahneman exposed this tendency in a study conducted in 1983,3 in which half of the
participants were asked to guess the chance that a massive flood would occur somewhere in North
America, while the other half were asked the likelihood of a massive flood occurring due to an earthquake
in California.

By definition, the chance of a flood in California is necessarily smaller than that of a flood for all of North
America. Participants said, nonetheless, that the chance of the flood in California, provoked by an
earthquake, is higher than that in all of North America. An explanation is that an earthquake in California is
easier to imagine. There is a coherent story, which begins with a familiar event (the earthquake) that causes
the flood, in a context that creates a vivid picture in one’s head. A large, ambiguous area like all of North
America does not create a clear picture, so the prediction has no lasting mental imprint to draw on.

Why it's important

The availability heuristic has serious consequences in most professional fields and many aspects of one’s
daily life. People make thousands of decisions per day and factors such as media coverage, emotional
reactions and vivid images have greater influence than they would in an entirely rational calculation.
Awareness of our intrinsic biases can be a safeguard against fallacious reasoning, unintentional
discrimination or costly mistakes in investments and business decisions.

How to avoid it
The availability heuristic is a label for the core cognitive function of saving mental effort that we often go
through. Unfortunately, unlike a sleight of hand trick, simply knowing how it works is not sufficient to
overcome it completely.4 The availability heuristic describes behavior that results from numerous shortcuts
that our brain makes in order to process all of the world’s information.

Although awareness alone cannot change one’s thought process, it is essential in order to support and
implement policies that take the heuristic into account. Taking steps to recognize and check the availability
heuristic is crucial for ensuring fair treatment for consumers and citizens in areas ranging from regulating
gambling law, to preventing discrimination, to holding the media accountable.

System 1 and System 2 thinking

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In practice, guaranteeing thoughtful and rigorous mental analysis is challenging. The availability heuristic is
everywhere, so avoiding its effects demands what Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, two pioneers in the
field of behavioral science, referred to as ‘System 2 thinking’. System 2 refers to the mental network that is
engaged in deliberative, careful and reflective decision-making.5 As opposed to System 1, which is fast and
automatic. The availability heuristic works on System 1 because upon thorough reflection, people are able
to realize that their quick approximations of probable outcomes are skewed.

Overcoming the availability heuristic involves activating System 2 thinking. This is often easier to do in
collective decision making because others can catch instances when one is captivated by superficially
convincing (but ultimately false) information.

A more deliberate strategy to counter the availability heuristic is called ‘red-teaming.’ Red-teaming
involves nominating one member of a group to challenge the prevailing opinion, no matter their personal
beliefs.6 Intentionally seeking out the mistakes that occur in individual decision-making can reduce the
chance that heuristics are reflexively treated as facts.

Red-teaming for debiasing the availability heuristic

In order for red-teaming, or other similar initiatives, to effectively identify the availability heuristic, we must
be aware of the bias in order to observe its effect on the behavior of the group. Understanding a bias may
not eliminate it completely from our decision-making; however, it increases the chances that we will be
able to identify it in group settings, or in the behavior of colleagues and collaborators.

Heuristics like the availability heuristic are especially tenacious until one develops an understanding of how
they work. A dedicated devil’s advocate can fall prey to the same biases that they are designed to prevent
unless they are specifically attentive to the cases where those biases take effect.

Combining expert insights from behavioral science with dedicated resources can prevent bad decision-
making and can help increase productivity across a variety of environments. For those of us without an
expert consultant on hand, learning about behavioral science is a solid first step towards leveraging its
power to influence important choices.

How it all started

Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman’s work in 19737 helped generate insights about the availability
heuristic. They described the availability heuristic as “whenever [one] estimates frequency or probability by
the ease with which instances or associations could be brought to mind.” In simpler terms, one guesses the
likelihood that things happen by using easily recalled memories as a reference.

The concluding remarks of their paper noted that analyzing the heuristics that a person uses when making
decisions can predict whether their judgement will be too high or too low. Everyday life is filled with
uncertainty due to the seemingly infinite number of decisions and information that our brains process
daily, which is why knowing about common heuristics is so important. By being aware of the availability
heuristic, humans can make less judgemental errors under uncertain conditions.

Example 1 - Lottery winners

Let’s say you watch a documentary series, or see a plethora of advertisements, about the luxurious lives of
those who won the lottery. After watching, you mistakenly figure that your chances of winning are higher
than they actually are. Why did this happen? The documentary showcased the winner’s luxury house and

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brand new sports car; this left a strong impression in your mind, which will ultimately help with ease of
recall. 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. However, you forgot the
homework assignment you did for your statistics class a few years earlier where you calculated the odds of
winning the 6/49 lottery as 1 in 13,983,816.8 Unfortunately, your ticket did not win, which may not have
surprised you if you could’ve more easily recalled the actual odds you were up against.

Example 2 - Drug use and the media

A study by Russell Eisenman in 19939 examined how media coverage of specific topics can impact people’s
perceptions via the availability heuristic. In this study, college students were asked if drug use in the United
States was increasing or decreasing. It was found that they were more likely to say that it was increasing
despite reputable survey data from the National Household Survey on Drug Abuse that claimed otherwise.
Eisenman cited a 1984 study by Tyler and Cook10 which concluded that constant media coverage of certain
topics like drug use can distort perceptions of how often those events occur in the real world.

The key idea is that news stories about sensationalized and relatively rare topics such as drug use or plane
crashes can evoke the availability heuristic. People wildly overestimate the chance that these events
happen compared to other deadly events that are statistically more likely, such as heart disease or car
accidents. Depending on what you watch and read (and, perhaps most importantly, how much they inform
your actions), your decisions could be based on heavily biased information.

Summary

What it is

The availability heuristic describes the mental shortcut where we make decisions based on emotional cues,
familiar facts, and vivid images that leave an easily recalled impression in our minds.

Why it happens

The brain tends to minimize the effort necessary to complete routine tasks. When making decisions —
especially ones involving probability — certain memories and knowledge jump out to replace the
complicated task of calculating statistics. Some memories leave a lasting impression because they connect
to emotional triggers. Others seem familiar because they align with the way we process the world, such as
recognizing words by their first letter.

Example #1 – Lottery winners

One buys lottery tickets because the lifestyle that follows a winning ticket comes to mind easily and vividly,
while the probability of winning is a complex calculation that does not jump out while one is at the ticket
counter.

Example #2 – Drug use and the media

Sensational news stories seem much more likely to occur than unremarkable (yet dangerous) activities. The
availability heuristic skews the distribution of fear towards events that leave a lasting mental impression
due to their graphic content or unexpected occurrence versus comparatively dangerous yet more probable
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events.

How to avoid it

The best way to avoid the availability heuristic, on a small scale, is to combine expertise in behavioral
science with dedicated attention and resources to locate the points where it takes hold of individual
choices. On a larger scale, the solution remains similar. Dedicating a specialized team to focus on the role
of heuristics in public policy, institutional behavior or media output can achieve more logical outcomes
wherever human behavior is concerned.

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