Decision Tips
Don’t over-rely on your memory.
I remember things the way they should have been.
—T. Capote
In May 2013, the lead story in every newspaper and on every TV network in the United States was about three young women in Cleveland being found after having been missing for ten years.1 The girls had been kidnapped and held captive by a stranger. Quickly following this upbeat conclusion to what had been a decade-long mystery, the media began running stories of missing children around the country. The media was clearly exploiting the popular fear among parents of their children being abducted by strangers.
I use the term “exploiting” because the truth is that the parental fear of their children being kidnapped by strangers is unjustified. So is the belief by many parents that these kidnappings are on the increase. Let me share two facts with you.2 First, most missing children are not taken by strangers. Most missing children disappear as a result of running away, being abducted by a parent, or from miscommunication. In actuality, only one-hundredth of one percent of all missing children are taken by strangers. Second, the number of missing children has actually gone down 31 percent between 1997 and 2011. Contrary to media hype, there is no widespread problem. In fact, the actual abductions of children by strangers in the United States is about 100 every year—a sad fact but far from an epidemic. A child aged 14 or under is more likely to die in a bicycle accident than be kidnapped by a stranger. And let me add a third fact: The competition among media encourages sensationalism. Newspapers, network news, cable, CNN, blogs, Twitter, and countless other media outlets are fighting for your attention. Because fear of abduction is an attention-grabber, it lends itself to sensationalism.
So why are parents so much more fearful today than 10 or 20 years ago? They have been sucked in by the availability bias. The availability bias says that we tend to remember events that are most available in our memory—those that are the most recent and vivid. This, in turn, distorts our ability to recall events in a balanced manner and results in distorted judgments and probability estimates.3 In the case of missing children, the barrage of media attention focused on this subject distorts the actual likelihood of this happening.
As noted in Chapter 3, “Why It’s Hard to Be Rational,” one of the most obvious examples of this phenomenon relates to fear of flying. The objective evidence consistently shows that flying on a commercial airline is one of the safest, if not the safest, forms of transportation. You’re far more likely to die in a car than in a plane. The probability of dying in a plane is 1 in 11 million versus 1 in 5,000 for dying in a car crash, yet millions of people don’t believe these numbers or have difficulty internalizing them. Why? Because when a plane goes down and people die, it makes headlines. The stories and pictures about these accidents grab at our emotions and become indelibly marked in our memory. Dozens of people die every day in car accidents. However, unless one of those individuals is a friend or relative, or the accident is extraordinary for some reason (“10 People Killed in 50 Car Pile-Up”), these deaths don’t affect our behavior or future decisions. The media coverage given to earthquakes, tornadoes, shark attacks, terrorist attacks, and similar dramatic events tends to make them more available in our memory, and as a result we tend to think they’re more frequent than they are.
The media coverage given to earthquakes, tornadoes, shark attacks, terrorist attacks, and similar dramatic events tends to make them more available in our memory, and as a result we tend to think they’re more frequent than they are.
The key to understanding this bias is recognizing that you’re a product of your experience. What you’ve seen, read, and experienced shapes your perceptions of risk and probabilities. To the degree that your experiences are biased, your perceptions of risk and probabilities are likely to be inaccurate.
What are the implications of this bias on your decision making? Because most of us don’t have balanced experiences, we distort risks and probabilities. We avoid some risks that aren’t that risky and ignore risks that we shouldn’t ignore. Then we end up making a wide range of poor decisions—for instance, regarding travel, insurance, and exercise. We avoid taking vacations to exotic and interesting places because of unfounded fears that we might be victims of terrorists or kidnappers. Residents of Los Angeles and Seattle run out and buy earthquake insurance right after experiencing a major earthquake when in actuality the near-term risk of another major quake has declined. And many people used the highly publicized death of running guru Jim Fixx at age 52 to conclude that exercise was dangerous.
Astute businesspeople have learned how to turn the availability bias to their advantage. Insurance salespeople exploit the fact that we’re prone to overestimate unlikely events, so they push highly profitable products like earthquake, tornado, fire, and flood insurance. Executives who understand that “out of sight is out of mind” approve large advertising budgets to keep their products and services vivid in our memory. Film producers understand the power of this bias; that’s why they release so many of their best movies near the end of the year. In the quest to win Academy Awards, producers realize that voters are more likely to recall a movie that they saw last month than one they viewed 10 or 11 months ago. And activists exploit this bias. Anti-nuclear proponents, for instance, used the 2011 meltdown of three reactors at Japan’s Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant to revive anti-nuclear protests and push for the abandonment of nuclear power.
The availability bias is tough to overcome. Nevertheless, I can offer a couple of suggestions. First, don’t over-rely on your memory for information prior to making a decision. For major decisions, substitute objective research and data gathering for information drawn from memory. For example, many bosses recognize that they tend to give greater weight in annual employee reviews to what their employees have done most recently. To help offset that tendency, they keep a journal for each employee of his or her ongoing performance and then update it regularly. They can then refer to this record before making their performance appraisal. A second suggestion is to question your data. Ask yourself this question: Am I being unduly influenced by information that is readily available, recent, or vivid? Finally, a long-term approach would be to expand your experiences. Read more. Travel more. Learn more about diverse peoples and cultures. The wider the breadth of your experiences, the more accurate your perceptions of risk and probabilities are likely to be.
Don’t over-rely on your memory.
Ask yourself if you’re being unduly influenced by information that is readily available, recent, or vivid.
Expand your experiences.