Availability Bias: Making Decisions Based On Vivid Examples
“An idea or a fact is not worth more merely because it is easily available to you.”
What you remember most vividly in your past influences your future. That’s the power of personal experience.
The stories, memories, and examples that are easily available to you guide the decisions you make, the stories you tell, and how you position yourself in the world.
This is called “availability bias.” And you can either succumb to this common mental error or learn to use it in your favor…
What Is Availability Bias?
Availability bias (also called the “availability heuristic”) is the impact of your most vivid experiences or memories on decision-making.
It’s a mental shortcut that allows you to easily connect ideas or decisions based on immediate or vivid examples.
Charlie Munger talks about availability bias in his speech called, The Psychology of Human Misjudgment. Here, he calls it Availability-Misweighing Tendency:
“This mental tendency echoes the words of the song: ‘When I’m not near the girl I love, I love the girl I’m near.’
Man’s imperfect, limited-capacity brain easily drifts into working with what’s easily available to it. And the brain can’t use what it can’t remember or what it is blocked from recognizing because it is heavily influenced by one or more psychological tendencies bearing strongly on it, as the fellow is influenced by the nearby girl in the song.
And so the mind overweighs what is easily available and thus displays Availability-Misweighing Tendency.”
You can sum this up with the phrase: “out of sight, out of mind.” You place too much importance on the facts and information you can remember, and less importance on the facts not immediately available to you.
Here’s Munger again:
“The great algorithm to remember in dealing with this tendency is simple: An idea or a fact is not worth more merely because it is easily available to you.”
As you may guess, availability bias is the cause of a lot of errors in judgment. Let’s look at a few…
Examples of Availability Bias
Fear of Flying
Excessive coverage on the news or social media about plane crashes uses vivid images and stories to elicit an emotional response. That’s why many people develop a fear of flying - they remember those images the next time they fly.
Yet, this fear is entirely in opposition to the statistical danger of flying. The chances of experiencing a plane crash on a commercial airline are incredibly low.
But, data doesn’t usually speak to us emotionally. It’s much easier to remember the vivid images of destruction.
Availability bias makes those images easily accessible, causing an irrational fear of flying.
Memories of Past Success
People try to repeat what has worked for them in the past. This is so even if the variables have changed significantly since that past success happened.
This occurs in professional sports all the time. General Managers who have won championships in the past bring with them vivid memories not just of the win, but of how they won.
So, naturally, they try to duplicate their prior process and success with their new team.
The problem is that the game may have changed in the interim. Availability bias doesn’t allow them to acknowledge that “this time is different.”
Don’t let vivid stories and experiences of past success stop you from seeing that things have changed. What worked before may well not work now.
Climate Change Denial
If you experience an unseasonably cold day, you may wonder how that supports climate change and a warming climate.
Politicians do this all the time. They replace larger data sets with individual experiences because they’re more vivid and available to recall.
The fact is, data support a warming climate overall, no matter how cold it is on a spring day in April.
How To Avoid Availability Bias
Munger has a few ideas to help you avoid availability bias when making decisions. Taken seriously and implement with care, these will give you an edge.
Use Checklists.
“It is also essential for a thinking man to assemble his skills into a checklist that he routinely uses. Any other mode of operation will cause him to miss much that is important.” - Charlie Munger
Checklists are the antidote to many, many mental biases. Doctors with decades of experience use them to check off the “obvious” stuff during procedures. Things like making sure they wash their hands, and operate on the correct limb.
I use checklists for all my writing. If it’s good enough for an MD, it’s good enough for me. Use checklists.
Focus On The abstract over the Concrete.
“What should be done is to especially emphasize factors that don’t produce reams of easily available numbers, instead of drifting mostly or entirely into considering factors that do produce such numbers.” - Charlie Munger
It’s easy to build stories from stuff that produces concrete numbers or data. But, if you’re not careful, this could lead you to ignore disconfirming evidence found in more abstract forms.
So, make sure you don’t gloss over facts that are harder to decipher.
Actively Look for Disconfirming Evidence.
“Still another antidote is to find and hire some skeptical, articulate people with far-reaching minds to act as advocates for notions that are opposite to the incumbent notions.” - Charlie Munger
Charlies Darwin was famous for looking for disconfirming evidence while collecting data. This helped him avoid confirmation bias and availability bias when drafting his conclusions.
You should do the same. Look for evidence that discounts your previous findings.
In other words, if you are leaning in one direction in a big decision, invert the problem. Ask yourself - how could I be wrong? How could this GO wrong?
And then consider the consequences if you are.
Underweigh Memorable Evidence or Experiences.
“One consequence of this tendency is that extra- vivid evidence, being so memorable and thus more available in cognition, should often consciously be under weighed while less vivid evidence should be overweighed.” - Charlie Munger
If you can remember something easily, put less importance on it when it comes to making a decision. Purposefully under weigh the vivid examples that come to mind, and lean into the haze.
How To Use Availability Bias To Influence Others
Simple: become a great storyteller.
If you want to convince someone of something, tell them an exciting, vivid, story. Or write it down and have them read it.
Stories that use visual language and elicit the senses of the reader are powerful. They can influence how someone thinks about a problem or solution, and you can use stories to push your reader or listener in a particular direction.
Trial lawyers are masterful storytellers. They understand that facts don’t move people, stories do.
So, tell more stories. And keep going.