Availability Heuristic

If you can picture it easily, your brain assumes it happens often. That's not logic — that's a glitch being exploited every single day.

The availability heuristic is your brain's shortcut for estimating probability: if examples come to mind quickly, it must be common. After seeing news coverage of a plane crash, flying feels dangerous. After hearing about a shark attack, the ocean feels threatening. Meanwhile, the car ride to the airport — statistically far more dangerous than either — feels perfectly safe, because car accidents don't make headlines.

This is not a minor error. It fundamentally distorts how you see the world. Whatever gets covered more feels more real, more common, more urgent. Media organisations know this. So do politicians. If crime is shown on the news every night, crime feels like it's rising — even when statistics show it's falling. Your lived sense of reality is being shaped not by what actually happens, but by what's most visible.

Social media makes this worse. Outrage travels faster than nuance, so extreme events dominate your feed. Your mental model of the world is built from whatever your brain can retrieve most easily — and that's almost always whatever was most recent, most emotional, or most repeated.

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References

• Daniel Kahneman — Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011)
• Dan Ariely — Predictably Irrational (2008)