Availability Bias: How easy memories make it tough to take better decisions
Exploring a deceptively too subtle to notice but most difficult bias to save yourself from making imprecise decisions
Faced with a need for an immediate decision, we tend to dig quickly into our memories, we try to find things that can help us to decide quickly as possible, and in the process, we rely on things we remember easily or the things we are used to on regular basis. This is the only time, where our minds' availability bias helps us make a better decision, it allows us to quickly conclude a choice.
When faced with such a situation, we often lack the time or resources to make decisions as precise as possible. Hence taking this shortcut to make the decision is too deceptive for us to notice in any other situations where we don’t have any constraints on time or resources. It is where we take this shortcut not because we lack resources, but we are naturally biased in a certain way to make decisions, we use easy memories, easy to remember, easy to accept, easy to access, and easy to process emotionally. And what we recall is not necessary always a fact, or not always something helping us to make the right choice, but we consider it relatively more important because these are our memories.
“People tend to assess the relative importance of issues by the ease with which they are retrieved from memory — and this is largely determined by the extent of coverage in the media.” - Daniel Kahneman
The availability bias describes our tendency to use information that comes to mind quickly and easily when making decisions. We, time and again value our decisions based on memories associated with them. And this happens so subtly in our life, that we ignore facts opposite to our beliefs.
Let’s see how this bias affects us in our lives.
“For the first time in history, you are your worst enemies. Fewer people died in 2017 due to UN violence than due to obesity, car accidents, and suicides, Statistically, you have a greater chance of killing yourself than any soldier or terrorist. Sugar is a greater danger than gunpowder. You are more likely to die from drinking too much cola than being blown up by al-Qaeda. And this is very good news.” - Yuval Noah Harari
The way we consume news from the media or any other source, we often consider that everything that is being told on the media networks is everything that is happening in this world. It obsessively covers terror attacks and greatly inflates its danger, because news on terrorism buys viewers much better than reports on diabetes or air pollution. The topics media cover, the topic media ignores, decides how much most of us know about the outside world and how we make decisions when it’s time. When you go for casting your vote in any election, your decision purely relies on the information available to you, now think if this information is intentionally put in front of you to influence your decision, no matter how good you will feel about your decision, it was never your own choice.
In relationships, we often judge people based on the most significant memory we have about them. In taking any decision about our career, we often feel something is more right because we saw people doing that and getting the results we desire, but we then ignore the fact that there are more people doing something different and getting better results just because we saw a fewer of them in our network, or we never tried to find if there are others with better ways of doing things.
Let’s explore more about this topic with the following articles from the internet.
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Very well articulated and much relevant to the current time where information is abundant and people tend to make quick judgments about almost anything. This little write up should give a queue for making ourselves more aware to pursue this further in order to be mindful when we are falling prey for it. Thanks for the linked resources.