Mental Model Fundamentals: Availability Heuristic

Note: For more mental models, see Mental Model Fundamentals.

Humans most easily recall what feels salient, frequent, and recent.

Long(er) Descriptions:

“The availability heuristic operates on the notion that if something can be recalled, it must be important, or at least more important than alternative solutions which are not as readily recalled. Subsequently, under the availability heuristic, people tend to heavily weigh their judgments toward more recent information, making new opinions biased toward that latest news.” (Wikipedia)

“...[R]ecalling an event and estimating its real probability are two different things… We too easily assume that our recollections are representative and true and discount events that are outside of our immediate memory.” (Farnam Street)

Related Examples:

• Judgments about relative risk (e.g., the likelihood of shark attacks) - “After seeing news stories about high-profile child abductions, you begin to believe that such tragedies are quite common. You refuse to let your child play outside by herself and never let her leave your sight.”

Related Quotes:

• “The attention which we lend to an experience is proportional to its vivid or interesting character; and it is a notorious fact that what interests us most vividly at the time is, other things equal, what we remember best.” ~ William James

Related Remedies:

• “An idea or a fact is not worth more simply because it is easily available to you.” ~ Charlie Munger
• Bayesian Reasoning (Bayes’ Theorem) - Your belief is only as valid as how well it fits all available evidence, relative to alternative hypotheses.
• Probabilistic Thinking - The future holds a wide variety of potential future outcomes, with distinct probabilities and consequences.
• Seeing the Front - Proactively go to the frontlines for a clear view of the situation, reducing reliance on often biased advisors, maps, and reports.

Related Concepts:

• Sunk Cost Bias - Continuing with fruitless endeavors after irreversibly losing our initial investment.
• Law of the Instrument (Maslow’s Hammer) - When solving problems, we rely heavily on the tools that are most familiar to us.
• Inertia - When no forces act upon an object, it will keep moving on the same path at the same speed.
• Narrative Instinct - Humans rely on stories to make sense of the world, creating logical, but not necessarily true, chains of cause and effect.
• Proxy (Variable) - Something easily observable or measurable is often used in place of what is actually desired, despite not being directly relevant, as accurate, or as meaningful.
• The Map is Not the Territory - A representation of something is not the thing itself.
• Proximate vs Root Cause - The proximate cause is the easily blamable symptom, while the root cause is the ultimately responsible disease.
• Fog of War - The battlefield immediately becomes confusing and distorted once the battle begins, so you cannot always rely on the original plan.
• Anchoring - “An individual depends too heavily on an initial piece of information offered (considered to be the "anchor") when making decisions.”
• Focusing Illusion - “Nothing is ever as important as what you’re thinking about while you’re thinking about it.”
• Streetlight Effect - “People tend to get their information from where it’s easiest to look.”
• Contrast Effect - “The enhancement or reduction of a certain stimulus' perception when compared with a recently observed, contrasting object.”
• Identifiable Victim Effect - “The tendency to respond more strongly to a single identified person at risk than to a large group of people at risk.”
• Peak-End Rule - “People judge an experience largely based on how they felt at its peak (i.e., its most intense point) and at its end, rather than based on the total sum or average of every moment of the experience.”
• von Restorff Effect - “When multiple homogeneous stimuli are presented, the stimulus that differs from the rest is more likely to be remembered.”
• Omission (and Abstract) Bias - “Favor an act of omission over one of commission... A tendency to judge harmful actions as worse, or less moral, than equally harmful omissions (inactions).”
• Mere Exposure Effect - “The tendency to express undue liking for things merely because of familiarity with them.”
• Attribute Substitution (a.k.a., Bait and Switch) - “When faced with a hard question, we often surreptitiously replace it with an easy one.”
• Affordances - “The perceptual systems of any organism are designed to “pick up” the information that is relevant to its survival and ignore the rest.”
• Inattentional Blindness - “People often don’t consciously perceive aspects in their surroundings that fall outside of their focus of attention.”

Related Resources:

• Availability: A heuristic for judging frequency and probability
• 3 Things Everyone Should Know About the Availability Heuristic
• Availability Heuristic and Decision Making