← all facts
decision making
Ease of memory leads us to overestimate rare events.
A 1973 study showed that people judge the frequency of an event by how easily they can recall examples from memory.
Because dramatic or scary events are easier to remember, they seem more frequent than common, mundane ones. The brain mistakes the vividness of an image for the probability of its occurrence.
If you can imagine it clearly, you fear it disproportionately.
Where this comes from
- Study
- Tversky & Kahneman, 1973, Availability Heuristic
- What the check found
- The claim accurately reflects the seminal 1973 paper by Tversky and Kahneman, which formally introduced the availability heuristic.
- Confidence
- Well replicated
Related
One of these every day, and every one names the study it came from. When a finding is contested, it says so.