you are wondering what the risk was, more than 8 million visits to the emergency room each year are due to falls at home, and more than 17,000 people in the United States die each year from such falls and resulting complications (National Safety Council, 2015). Now, I said I put my life in “great jeopardy.” Almost anything we do (e.g., walking, exercising, or eating) carries some risk. While walking, we could trip and fall. While exercising, we could dislocate a joint. While eating, we could choke or ingest something poisonous. So, I need to clarify what I meant by “great jeopardy.” I am guessing the risks associated with these everyday behaviors have not crossed your mind unless, of course, they have happened to you. However, other risks may well have crossed your mind. Terrorism is in the news a lot. There is a chance you could be a victim of terrorism. However, how great is that risk? The U.S. Department of State (2014) reported that worldwide, 16 Americans died from terrorist-related activity worldwide in 2013. Another 12 Americans were kidnapped and another 7 were injured from terrorism. Compare that total (35 Americans) with the 17,000 Americans who die from falling each year. I have a 485 times greater chance of dying trying to do my laundry than I do of dying in a terrorist attack. Based on these statistics, should we be more concerned about falling at home or about terrorism?
Even with this statistical information, you may not be convinced that terrorism is less of a threat than is falling at home, and that is understandable. We tend to ignore probabilities for a very good reason. We need to make a lot of decisions in our lives. We make decisions all of the time. What class to study for first? Go running or go to yoga (or, in my case, what TV show to watch)? What to eat for a snack? What to wear today? We make many of our decisions using heuristics, which are mental shortcuts, based on prior experience, that allow us to make decisions quickly. Let’s take a simple example. Suppose you are at the grocery store needing to buy toothpaste; you probably would not look in the fresh produce section. Likewise, if you want to buy fresh strawberries, you probably would not look on the baking supplies isle. Did you ever notice those signs above the various isles in the grocery store (and many other types of stores)? Those signs are heuristics in that they give shoppers a general idea of the products contained on that isle. They do not guarantee that the product you are looking for will be there, but in all likelihood (i.e., probability), it will be. We can contrast heuristics with algorithms, which are step-by-step procedures that guarantee, eventually, that we will solve a problem correctly. In the grocery store example, you could walk up and down each isle looking for the toothpaste, and eventually, you would indeed find it. However, who wants to spend their time that way? Most people prefer to navigate the world as quickly and efficiently as possible, and heuristics, not algorithms, make that possible.
Photos 1.2a and 1.2b Stairs to the basement. A killer in plain sight?
Source: ©iStockphoto.com/danhowl
Heuristic: mental shortcut that allows us to make decisions quickly.
Algorithm: step-by-step procedure that guarantees a correct solution to a problem.
So it is with making many, if not most, of our decisions in life. Last night, I made a decision to go downstairs and do laundry, and no, the risk I was taking never crossed my mind. I bet that the notion of being a victim of terrorism scares people more than being the victim of a fall despite the overwhelming odds of dying from a fall. Let’s examine why this is the case.
Availability heuristic
Which of these two headlines do you think will capture people’s attention more? First, “Statistics Teacher Dies Carrying Laundry Downstairs.” Or second, “Civilian Killed in Terrorist Attack.” I am betting more people will read the story that accompanies the second headline. In fact, would the first headline even make the news? I doubt it would. The availability heuristic involves estimating the frequency of some event happening, based on how easily we can think of examples of that event (Tversky & Kahneman, 1974). When there is an act of terrorism, it is much more likely to be on the news than when a person dies falling in his or her home. Perhaps the local news would make mention of a person dying in a fall, but even if that is the case, hearing about a terrorist act is more frightening to people and more likely to stick in their minds. Let’s discuss one reason we rely on the availability heuristic, and then we’ll discuss a couple of applications of it.1
At some point, I bet you have had to do a group project. One characteristic of a functional work group is that each member has an assigned role and responsibilities (West, Borrill, & Unsworth, 1998). Even if this task was done in your groups, did you ever get the feeling that as the project moved along, you were doing more than other members of your group? If so, there is a reason why we, at least in Western cultures, tend to think this way. How does the availability heuristic work in this situation? Because we are egocentric, we have difficulty seeing the world from other people’s perspectives. We are each fully aware of the work we are doing, how challenging that work is, the time we invested in that work, and so on. However, that information about the work other people have done is not so readily available to us; hence, it is why most people in this culture tend to overestimate their individual contribution to a group project.
Availability heuristic: estimating the frequency of some event happening, based on how easily we can think of examples of that event.
Egocentrism: tendency to perceive the world from our individual, unique perspective.
Photo 1.3 An example of egocentrism, Boston style.
Indeed, egocentrism is an important reason why we rely on the availability heuristic. It takes a lot of time and effort to perceive the world from a perspective other than our own. Take another example. In this culture, we often say, “The run rises in the morning,” and “The sun sets in the evening.” In reality, the sun does not go anywhere; we on Earth are moving, but we cannot see or feel that motion. Therefore, what is available to us is whether we can see the sun. Thanks to our egocentrism, it appears thesun is moving, but it is not. Although being egocentric is normally not a problem to our daily functioning, it can require some altering of our thinking when presented with information, especially quantitative information that may feel impersonal and that counters our perspectives. For instance, one of my best friends from high school grew up in Massachusetts before moving to Plano, Texas, where we met. A few months after he moved, his family decided to vacation in the Rio Grande Valley in South Texas. They were shocked at how long a drive it would be from Plano (about 9 hours). After all, it was all in the same state. However, states in the northeastern United States are geographically smaller than they are in the southwestern United States. So to get from one end of a state in the Northeast to the other end of that same state requires far less time than it does in Texas. What was available to my friend and his family was their perspective on the geographic size of a “state,” which varies greatly across regions of the country.
Photo 1.4 Winning at the casino seems so easy on TV.
Source: ©iStockphoto.com/DarrenMower
So now that we understand why we rely on availability, let’s see it in action. Advertisers make good use of the availability heuristic in trying to persuade people to buy their products and services. For example, casinos will create commercials in which people who won money are proudly displaying their winnings, saying how much fun they had at the casino, and how it is the best
