Availability Bias

The other day I read about "Availability Bias," a concept that won a few psychologists a Nobel Prize in 2002. The idea here is that people tend to attach too much importance, validity, relevance or likelihood to factors that they are more aware of. For instance, you might read about lottery winners, which makes you believe that your chances of winning are greater than they are, and incite you with false expectations to play the lottery. Or you see the sensational media accounts of a few airplane crashes and develop an irrational fear of flying, when statistically your risk of dying is greater in an automobile.

Despite everything you hear about the human brain being the most powerful computer ever made, it is quite clear to me that most of us are not ruled by our brains, and generally don't act rationally. Availability Bias is just one example. Daniel Gilbert's recent book Stumbling On Happiness also illustrated this principle very nicely--we are terrible at predicting what will make us happy, or at least we aren't very good at acting upon what we might truly know in the deepest recesses of our rational minds.

I think we also tend to do a very poor job of generating the facts to make a decision. The truth is, most of us don't want to be bothered with the potential for a major shift in our perspective. So the Right tunes in to Fox News for decision-making data, and the Left to Jon Stewart. (Yep, that's true!) Most people fear the other side, both those on it, but even more, the possibility that they might be holding a smidgeon of truth.

A corollary to this is the filters we employ to automatically sort and interpret all data based on what we already have chosen to believe. This is historically true in science, enough to fuel an unhealthy skepticism for all those with enough temerity to challenge the prevailing thought. But it's equally true in religion, politics and sports. We all look way too hard for corroborating data, and our fervor leads us to find honor and shame split neatly along party lines, and the image of the Virgin Mary grown onto the side of a cow.

Now I don't think it's a terrible thing to follow your heart, for the mind is certainly prone to error. But it seems to me that we ought to be smart enough to know who is leading the dance at any given time, and to recognize the difference between heart and head. The brain is indeed a computer with a lot of RAM. Unfortunately, like many people with their PC's, it never gets used for anything more challenging than MySpace.