Availability Heuristic

What is it: the availability heuristic is a mental shortcut we use to make decisions that relies on how easily we can call information or examples to mind quickly…

Even though Tripadvisor has given this hotel 4.5/10, my friend has just told me she had a bad experience last week so I’m going to find another hotel…”

Overview

Heuristics are mental shortcuts we use to find solutions that are most likely to work given the least effort, but are not always right or the most accurate. It’s a ‘best guess’ to reduce the amount of thinking we need to do, and be quick about it.

Availability here, is the proximity or immediacy of information. Simply put, if we can find, remember, see or imagine information quickly and easily, we treat it as higher value information and it can disproportionately skew are decision making.

How do we decide what to call up? Well, the most basic is proximity, that is, the most recent piece of information we receive and that mean chronologically. It’s easier to remember what we’ve been exposed to most recently. The one that most people seem to ignore, is how memories are encoded and this can have a dramatic effect on the immediacy of calling up memories. Memories formed in emotionally charged situations (particularly negative emotions) are more easily recalled. You can thank the amygdala for that – this small part of the brain forms powerful emotional memories.

So ‘immediate’ memories are either chronologically recent or powerfully encoded (and easier to recall) by emotions.

What can we do to avoid this?

The best possible advice to avoiding heuristics causing you to make poor decisions is to give yourself time to make decisions slowly. That said, we use heuristics for a purpose and it isn’t always practical to force ourselves to be conscious when making decisions. This links into mindfulness where we try to train our brains to be present and aware of when we’re falling into subconscious routines, or going into ‘autopilot’.

Try to avoid subjective ‘opinions’ and instead look at statistics and especially trends. Trends by their very nature are formed by longer-term views and so aren’t swayed by just recent events.

Examples

• If I ask you whether there are more words in the English language starting with ‘K’ or with ‘K’ as the third latter, you’ll mentally start to list words starting with ‘K’. As you find it a lot easier than picturing works with ‘K’ as the third letter, you’ll estimate that it’s the former. It’s not, but that’s how heuristics work.
• Even though flying is one of the safest ways to travel, air disasters are usually incredibly visually strong events, often surrounded by personal stories, extended news articles, and even films and documentaries. As such, we can more easily recall visual examples and they are more heavily emotionally encoded – so they skew are belief of the likelihood of them happening. Over 2000 people die on UK roads every year yet I’ve never met anyone with a fear of driving as such!