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risk
You believe common causes of death are much rarer.
People consistently overestimate the frequency of dramatic deaths like shark attacks while underestimating common, quiet ones like strokes.
This is the availability heuristic at work. Your brain judges the probability of an event by how easily you can recall a specific instance of it. Media coverage makes vivid events easier to remember, distorting your sense of risk.
Your intuition is calibrated by news cycles, not actual statistics.
Where this comes from
- Study
- Lichtenstein et al., 1978, Journal of Experimental Psychology
- What the check found
- Lichtenstein et al. (1978) is the seminal paper confirming this effect. The evidence provided confirms the mechanism and the experimental finding.
- 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.