The availability heuristic is a cognitive shortcut where people judge how common, likely, or important something is based on how easily examples of it come to mind, rather than how frequently it actually occurs.
Keep in mind, the media reports unusual events, and remember the old adage, “If it bleeds, it leads.” This effect is compounded when we hear the same story from various sources and media types or a single event kicks of coverage of less serious but similar events.
US examples:
FOOD RECALLS
There’s a widespread belief that federal cuts have led to an unsafe food supply and that recalls have skyrocketed. Weirdly enough, 2026 is on track to be a normal year for recalls, maybe even low.
The cyclospora outbreak, which was damned bad, was largely a result of a diminished CDC’s ability to track the origin and spread. That was a result of staffing and budget cuts. While this event was going on, every single food recall made the news. 2026 seems unprecedented!
Keep in mind, 99% of food recalls are voluntary (this from several sources), initiated by the producer, nothing to do with the government. Producers have skin in the game. They don’t want to get sued or see their stock tank, let alone have the feds twist their booty up like a balloon animal. The remainder are a result of the FDA and the FSIS doing their job. Also, keep on eye on the amounts involved. Most are less than a single semi truckload.
AIRLINE SAFETY
After Boeing lost a door over Portland, there were daily stories about airplane issues. Every tiny event was breathlessly reported, especially if it involved a Boeing plane. Absurdly enough, reports at the time would slip a sentence in near the end of the story saying “this wasn’t a Boeing plane BTW”.
Boeing has no doubt pulled some serious safety blunders, but neither that company, nor the industry as a whole, suddenly became unsafe, but you wouldn’t know that if you followed the news in early 2024.
TRAIN SAFETY
After the disastrous derailment in East Palestine Ohio, it seemed trains were flying off the tracks daily. AH! And once again, daily reporting bent our opinion on a thing that’s actually common and usually not a big deal. After the hype wore off, well, when was the last time you read a story about a derailment? You could have read one every day in early 2023.
FRIVOLOUS LAWSUITS
The media doesn’t report the millions of meritorious lawsuits. They don’t report cases thrown out by judges, and they can’t report those that don’t make it past an initial attorney consult.
Lawyers have to work with the same judges for years, maybe a whole career. The last thing they want is to antagonize them with BS. On top of that, attorneys don’t want a loss on their record or a hit to their reputation.
One other note, some seemingly frivolous suits actually have legal merit, but the headlines only state the absurd part. Read the whole story. Anyone up for some McDonald’s coffee?
GETTING SHOT/MASS SHOOTINGS
Americans and foreigners both think it’s common to get shot in the US. The CDC puts yearly vehicular fatalities at the same number, give or take, as gun fatalities (50,000). So the odds are the same, right? Overall, yes. In reality? Not quite. The better question would be, are you more likely to die by gunshot or car crash?
Well over half of gun fatalities are suicides. Not to downplay those deaths! But they are not random events. Most of the rest is gang related activity. And again, not to downplay real deaths, but the vast majority of those are not random either.
Consider two scenarios:
A man goes nuts, kills his wife and two children, them himself. That makes national headlines, sometimes over a few days.
A family of 4 gets smeared off the interstate. Maybe a blurb in the local news, reported once and done.
But aren’t mass shootings a daily event? Nope. While way too damned common, the scene in our head when we hear the term rarely matches the reporting of total numbers. This chart spells it out better than I can.
Quite a disparity! Note the sources. The three on the left are anything but right-wing.
The availability heuristic applies to school shootings as well; you’ll hear about every event. Some sources count any time a gun is discharged on school grounds. If I put in round in the soccer field at midnight on Saturday, “school shooting”. You’ll find the same sorts of disparity as the mass shooting chart. You’ll find yet another disparity looking into the most common cause of childhood deaths. (One wonders why sources include 18 and 19 year olds. Lock up your guns and teach your kids to swim, no worries.)
TO CLOSE
Examine your biases regularly. Check multiple sources, check past numbers vs. what you’re seeing in the media. Read the whole story!
Random, horrible events make news, not common events, even if horrible. Yet sometimes common events can be blown up by reporting of a large initial event.
Don’t fall into social media hype. Over on Bluesky they have a completely different set of concerns about current events than lemmy because once a thing takes off, it gets amplified in a given space. I’ve often seen an item get reported several times in short order and thought, “Oh boy, here goes this week’s hype.”
For those inclined to really unpack this thing, here’s the paper that kicked off the idea of the availability heuristic:
https://cebma.org/assets/Uploads/Tversky_Kahneman_1974.pdf
Haven’t read it all myself, but it’s a banger so far!
Fantastic write-up. Other heuristics and logical fallacies deserve this treatment. You could be the Admiral Cloudberg of critical thinking skills.
Comparing gun shootings to traffic accidents? Everyone takes part in traffic, not everyone shoots a gun, or even owns one.
The Availability Heuristic can’t be that important. After all, no one ever even talks about it…
Boeing also murdered a witness whistleblowing about their safety violations just before his deposition, right around that time. I’m sure that didn’t help their public image.
Boeing is not just one door lol. Their software update made planes unflyable and killed nearly 350 people. The regulator was asleep at the wheel as well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_737_MAX_groundings
Their shit press is 100% earned
Yes! There was that and the fact the they replaced engineers with business guys. But the point is that every tiny incident involving a plane was reported at the time. If we opened up apnews.com today and there was this headline, “Plane Grounded Before Takeoff Because $minor_thing Discovered”, we’d find that odd. That headline was a daily thing for a month or so after Portland.
To the software thing specifically, that was two crashes among 14,000 planes making millions of flights a year. You remember it because it was unusual and because Boeing’s delayed response was so unusual (and all fucked up).
| made planes unflyable
…is rather making my point about the availability heuristic. The planes only encountered that failure mode in very specific and uncommon conditions. But you and I remember it because it was such an egregious fuck up. The odds of us dying in such an accident were infinitesimal, yet people were cancelling flights on Boeing airliners.
Remember the recent story about the asshole selling unpasteurized milk, getting people sick and refusing to recall? Pretty much the same deal. That was so fucking weird it made headlines. Who does that?! Availability heuristics.
Remember the recent story about the asshole selling unpasteurized milk, getting people sick and refusing to recall? Pretty much the same deal. That was so fucking weird it made headlines. Who does that?! Availability heuristics.
Which time? That dude has done it multiple times. It’s funny seeing a government-issued recall notice that has a note saying the producer denies any involvement in the outbreak.
The threshold for civil aviation is a lot higher though because of the impact. Literally.
I agree with all but two of your examples, and they stem from the same concern:
RE: outbreaks/airplane issues in the US, the fear isn’t thinking it’s common because it’s reported. At all. It’s the (rightful) breakage of trust in institutions after aggressive political cuts. It’s the underlying dread of everything that is now unreported due to understaffing and deregulation, so you can’t trust reported numbers to be accurate.
Our food was already known to be of poor quality, but the fig leaf of standards has been ripped away. I was, however, told growing up that major airlines are the safest form of travel (private planes are more dangerous) so to see that rigor be abandoned is unnerving.
Here’s a humorous take from a farmer on food safety:
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/R5x_wM-vSg8
That’s guys channel is well worth checking out! He’s a small farmer that spent 10-years building up, pays his people solid wages and talks farming and politics. He has a degree or two and schools us on American history and race relations. I love that guy.
EDIT: Meant to note in the OP, most of these recalls are about the possibility of an issue. An FDA Level I alert! AH! Turns out they’re pretty much all Level I alerts because they operate on “better safe than sorry”.
That’s guys channel is well worth checking out! He’s a small farmer that spent 10-years building up, pays his people solid wages and talks farming and politics. He has a degree or two and schools us on American history and race relations. I love that guy.
heh, give me any random fifth of that paragraph and I could guess Farming While Beige :)
That fuckin’ guy needs to expand to Hampton Roads. He’s already delivering farther away in different directions!
I hope he expands into NJ sometime but I think he might think that was a curse lol
A little far to drive, maybe, but if he makes it that far, he’ll be doing pretty darned well :)
I mean, you’re still wrong on both points: our food has never been safer and flying is both the safest way to travel and safer than it’s ever been.
Yah, but, 43.7% of all statistics are made up on the spot.
92% of people believe something if there is a statistic cited in it.
55.4% of people have no idea what a percentage based statistic means.
And the other 68.4% are bad at math.
And about half of those on average have never seen a calculator with more than 5 buttons on it.
It’s statistical fuckery all the way down!
Hence the phrase, “There are lies, damned lies and statistics.”
Yes. My comments here are entirely facetious, but some may be taking me seriously. Such is written communication without non verbal cues
Lol, Would make for a good porno title, when statistics go hard
Oh professor, I need help with the lower quartile of my box… plot
Well over half of gun fatalities are suicides
What’s the other half? I’m not saying they’re all mass shootings or that if you go outside, you’ll get shot. But even just under 50% as non-suicides is a lot of shootings.
Also, I think mass shootings are under-reported. I go through the news every week day and I’m shocked about how many show up that I haven’t heard about.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_shootings_in_the_United_States_in_the_2020s
Mass shooting reporting is dependant on a few things; whether anyone died or not and the number, the age of the victims and how random the event was. That graph I posted mostly shows what I mean. In that year there was either a mass shooting every other day, or one every two months. People come away from the news claiming there’s literally one every single day. Lies, damned lies and statistics.
Most of the rest are said to be “gang related”, which is a dog whistle meaning, “Brown people killing each other doesn’t count.” It’s a useful distinction only in that such killings aren’t random. You’re more likely to catch a Volvo to the chest walking down any given street than a 9mm-shaped pill.
Most of the rest are said to be “gang related”, which is a dog whistle meaning, “Brown people killing each other doesn’t count.”
Could you be very clear about what you mean here. I’m not sure if it’s what it comes across as. Meaning, are you saying that all of those other shooters are brown people shooting each other? Cuz if it is, dude, you’re racist af.
Appreciate the write up
Thanks! Those are all items that have driven me nuts at one time or another so I had to get them off my chest. We humans are so easy to manipulate it’s rather horrifying.
It was useful for the warlords and kings to have subjects that were pliable. Thousands of years of rebellious souls being removed from the gene pool made monarchy much easier.
Hah! Dad said much the same about the Japanese. “You spend a thousand years chopping off the heads of rude people, you’ll end up with a very polite society.”
On a serious note, how does this summary account for funding and lack of reporting? For some of these topics it’s illegal to use federal funds to research into these topics and most of this data is self reported by state agencies and local municipalities that have the budgets to do so. Not everyone does. It’s also been shown that this administration has actively inhibited the recording and reporting of topics that make the administration look bad…they went on record during covid saying that there would be less cases if we don’t keep track of it…how does the data above take into account malicious reporting and selective biases due to lack of or prohibited funding when it comes to reporting and recording of the data?
If your concern is the Trump administration, well, you should be concerned. But keep in mind, they haven’t, and can’t, replace or drop all federal workers in a given domain. FDA and NTSB inspectors are still very serious fuckers.
As to being illegal to use federal funds for research, the only items I’ve ever heard of are weed, hallucinogenic therapies and gun control. Not sure how the latter works as they CDC is certainly compiling numbers and types of gun deaths. 🤷🏼♂️
I am concerned. I think everything is being underreported at the moment as that seems to be the mandate of this administration. Keep the work in the shadows…so when you do see something in the news, its my opinion that its much worse than what is being reported as that is how it has been with trump and the unqualified people he chose to be in his cabinet.
Yah the CDC has also now been thrown into the questionable reporting with the measles cases not being reported in PA, and their new directive to reduce reporting on flu, covid, and other respiratory viruses. Makes you wonder what else is being swept under the rug. CDC isn’t the gold standard it used to be sadly.
I’ve written, many times, to expect shit to get way worse. But we’re not there yet! The only reason the Trump admin hasn’t utterly tanked this country is that they’re trying to steer a fucking juggernaut.
For example, people often point to cuts in high-ranking military officers. So far they’re only chopped 10% of the General Staff. They can’t chop all 800 or so without a) crippling our military machines and/or b) outright rebellion.
We’ve already started to slide off the economic cliff, but we’re not in freefall quite yet. The American economy is too big to jack up too fast, though I admit I’ve never seen a single President fuck it up so hard and so quickly. Presidential economic policies usually are felt in, ya know, less than two damned years.
BTW, the new reporting thing, while heinous enough, was a Biden era rule regarding nursing homes that may get repealed. Yet more shit that ain’t bad yet, but hold onto your butt.
Presidential economic policies usually are felt in, ya know, less than two damned years.
So much this, agreed its just wild how quickly the bolts spun off the lugs for the wheels that is the US economy. They haven’t flown off the hub yet but are getting dangerously close to anyone thats paying attention.
Haven’t they managed to complete close to 60% of the project 2025 goals, so there is more to come, albeit some that isn’t nearly detrimental to the economy but certainly isn’t aligned with helping people.
Yah some of those funding restrictions have been in for decades, and yes biden even implemented some additional ones as well which were head scratchers, but the last two years has just been looney toons level of damage that will take decades to undo if we ever get there. Im afraid people just get complacent with the status quo.
A related issue is that the frequency of media coverage of an item often has little to do with its real-life frequency.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summer_of_the_Shark
The Summer of the Shark refers to the coverage of shark attacks by American news media in the summer of 2001. The sensationalist coverage of shark attacks began in early July following the Fourth of July weekend shark attack on 8-year-old Jessie Arbogast, and continued almost unabated—despite no evidence for an actual increase in attacks—until the September 11 terrorist attacks shifted the media’s attention away from beaches. The Summer of the Shark has since been remembered as an example of tabloid television perpetuating a story with no real merit beyond its ability to draw ratings.[1][2][3][4]
Investigative journalist John Stossel explains the media’s shark fixation in his book Give Me a Break, stating:
Instead of putting risks in proportion, we [reporters] hype interesting ones. Tom Brokaw, Katie Couric, and countless others called 2001 the “summer of the shark.” […] In truth, there wasn’t a remarkable surge in shark attacks in 2001. There were about as many in 1995 and 2000, but 1995 was the year of the O.J. Simpson trial, and 2000 was an election year. The summer of 2001 was a little dull, so reporters focused on sharks.[9]
When you combine that with this, you can get people with skewed perceptions of the world.
