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availability heuristic
You overestimate risks that appear frequently in the news.
People judge the probability of an event by how easily they can recall similar instances from memory.
This is the availability heuristic. Because news outlets report rare, dramatic events more often than common, dull ones, these events are more 'available' in your mind. You equate this mental ease with actual frequency, leading to irrational fear of unlikely outcomes.
Your fear is a reflection of your media exposure, not reality.
Where this comes from
- Study
- Tversky and Kahneman, 1973, Cognitive Psychology
- What the check found
- The definition is accurate and the seminal 1973 paper by Tversky and Kahneman in Cognitive Psychology is the correct, widely accepted citation.
- 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.