Availability Biases
Our tendency to think of those examples that come readily to mind as more representative than is actually the case leads to the cognitive biases called ‘availability bias’ that hamper critical thinking and, as a result, the validity of our decisions. The availability bias results from a cognitive shortcut known as the availability heuristic, which can be defined as the reliance on those things that we immediately think of to enable quick decisions and judgments. The reliance on what comes to our minds helps us avoid laborious fact-checking and analysis, but increases the likelihood that our decisions are flawed.
It is a human tendency to make quick decisions based on whatever comes to our mind rather than doing an elaborate analysis for our decision-making. Daniel Kahneman in his book ‘Thinking, Fast and Slow’ called this tendency WYSIATI, the acronym for What You See Is All There Is. We fill the gap of the missing information through our assumptions, intuition and emotions.
As already discussed earlier, due to our emotions, our mind fills the gap of information and constructs the whole picture from limited information, and we are not even aware of the absence of information. For example, there is no reason to believe that after the accident my brother, I had become a worse driver, or that road accidents on the roads of India have become more frequent, or other people have become worse drivers. Everything about me and the others remained the same before and after the accident of Abhimanyu. Logically speaking, the chances of an accident should have been lower after the tragedy as I would have been more careful while driving. However, my emotions dominated me in those days so much that I could not develop the courage to drive on roads for months.
Let us now discuss some of the most common availability biases.
(a) Media Bias
Almost all the media across the world provide disproportionally high coverage of negative news. For example, if there is one case of rape, murder or theft, it is widely reported in the media, while there is no reporting of millions of people who do good things in the society. Similarly, the corruption of one public official gets so much negative publicity in the media while a hundred public officers doing their jobs honestly never make the news.
In the media circle it is said, “When a dog bites a man, that is not news, because it happens so often. But if a man bites a dog, that is news.” The phrase man bites dog in journalism thus describes how an unusual, infrequent event is more likely to be reported as news than an ordinary, everyday occurrence. So, from the point of view of the media, an event is newsworthy only if it is unusual. However, due to such selective reporting, we usually develop very negative views about people, societies and organisations’ reality in the absence of first-hand knowledge about them.
Sometimes, the media creates disproportionally high false positive perceptions. For example, the media may avoid reporting corruption and failure of the country’s armed forces while complimenting them for even their smallest achievements. When national media fears the government in power, it tends to suppress the government’s bad decisions and omit its corrupt practices while speaking highly about their achievement. As a result, people develop a false positive perception of the government based on the available information. In the words of American singer and songwriter Jim Morrison, “Whoever controls the media, controls the mind.”
Only when we join an organization and deal with many people do we know that there are good and bad people in every organisation, almost in the same proportion as in the rest of society. Hence, your perception changes drastically. However, the perception of an outsider who knows about the organisation only through the press and media has a biased view, either on the positive or negative side.
(b) Emotional Impact
All information does not create the same level of emotional impact on us. For example, in June 2022, two Muslim men hacked a tailor to death a person named Kanhaiya Lal inside his tailoring shop in Udaipur in India, for posting a video online of remarks made by one Nupur Sharma, the official spokesman of the ruling Right Wing party in India, on the Prophet. In general, there are more than a hundred murders every day in India, but they are just statistics in the mind of most Indians. However, in this case, the assailants identified themselves, displayed the weapon used for the beheading, boasted about the “beheading”, and issued death threats to Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Nupur Sharma. As a result, this single case of murder made a high emotional impact on millions of Indians due to the sheer brutality of the murder.
Similarly, the death of our loved ones in an accident or murder makes a huge emotional impact on us as compared to the death of strangers. We are also more emotionally disturbed when a person of our religion, caste, nationality or organization has been harmed or killed. We can recall such incidents more because of their more significant emotional impact.
(c) Recency Bias
It is said that “time heals all wounds.” Our emotional wounds are healed gradually with time. I was so immobilised after the death of my younger brother after his death that I was always thinking of him and frequently crying. However, seven years after his death, I remember him fewer times, and the intensity of pain is much lesser.
Hence, when something good or bad happens in our lives, the availability bias is more pronounced immediately after the incident. For example, if a train accident occurs in a country, most people would be scared of travelling on the train in the next few days, and many people would cancel their tickets after the incident. The same happens when we read about the news of a plane crash or a terrorist attack in a city or country. However, the fact is that the chances of tragedy may be lower after the accident since more precautions would have been taken by the drivers, pilots or the government to prevent the mishap.
(d) Advertisement Bias
Advertisements are used all over the world by businessmen and leaders to sell their products or themselves. Advertisements are omnipresent, in newspapers, radio, television, and social media. Advertisements provide you with information about the product, but they also tend to create a desire in you to buy their products, whether you need them or not.
The English writer H. G. Wells called advertising legalized lying. The Canadian writer Stephen Leacock defined advertisement as the science of arresting human intelligence long enough to get money from it. Since our reasoning mind is careful while watching advertisements lest they fool us, advertisers usually focus on the emotional brain and tempt you with beautiful models, smiling faces, bubbling children and famous celebrities. Advertisements create an availability bias in us since we are more likely to buy the advertised products as we are more familiar with the promoted products. Advertisements convert us gradually at the unconscious level.
It may be better to pay upfront, if possible, to watch television programs, movies, or sports rather than watching them with lengthy advertisements, even for free. When you can’t avoid advertisements, you must simply ignore their claims unless they are backed by genuine data or independent reports. If possible, ask an actual user you know about the product rather than being swayed away by the advertisements.
(e) Propaganda Bias
The word propaganda means propagating one’s ideas or planting ideas in other people’s minds. Initially, it was used in the positive sense like teachers or parents planting ideas in children’s minds. However, in the modern context, propaganda refers to information and ideas that may be false or exaggerated and are used to gain support for a political leader, party, etc. According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, the word propaganda means the spreading of ideas, information, or rumours to help or injure an institution, a cause, or a person.
Propaganda is politicians’ most potent weapon to misguide the masses and convert them to follow their political ideologies. In recent times, no one used propaganda better than Adolf Hitler. He writes in his book Mein Kampf, “All propaganda must be popular and its intellectual level must be adjusted to the most limited intelligence among those it is addressed to. Consequently, the greater the mass it is intended to reach, the lower its purely intellectual level will have to be.” He further says, “The receptivity of the great masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous. In consequence of these facts, all effective propaganda must be limited to a very few points and must harp on these in slogans until the last member of the public understands what you want him to understand by your slogan. As soon as you sacrifice this slogan and try to be many-sided, the effect will piddle away, for the crowd can neither digest nor retain the material offered. In this way, the result is weakened and in the end, entirely cancelled out.”
In modern times, many political parties have created dedicated IT cells which officially and legally spread the propaganda to the masses using social media, newspapers and numerous news channels run by their supporters and businessmen to spread communal hatred in society, defame the opposition parties and project the counter-opinion and opponents of their ideologies as anti-nationals. Even young and innocent children are affected by their propaganda as much as educated senior citizens.
Unless we are careful, we are likely to fall into the trap of propaganda and develop an undue bias in favour of one political party and against another. Most propaganda tends to affect us emotionally, hence they create a feeling of hatred for the opposition and love for the party using propaganda, which are then exploited by the political parties during elections. We must identify and overlook the propaganda to maintain our sanity and rationality.
(f) Proximity Bias
There are almost eight billion people in the world. However, we usually spend more than ninety per cent of our time with hardly a few dozen people, including our friends, family members and colleagues in the office. So, we gather most of the information from people in our close company. There is a famous saying that a man is known by the company he keeps because a person’s thoughts tend to become similar to those with whom he spends most of his time. Accordingly, we are likely to develop the same character and moral standards as those with whom we surround ourselves.
We have the natural tendency to choose people who have similar ideologies and beliefs. We often avoid people whose opinions differ from theirs. Hence, gradually, the people around us carry similar beliefs and we tend to believe that those beliefs are rational and correct.
While keeping the company of like-minded people helps give us peace and happiness, it is dangerous for our rational thinking, as we fail to visualize the complete picture of reality. So, we must deliberately interact with people of different opinions to develop a balanced view. It may be helpful to read opposing views in the newspaper and watch debates on television where people of various shades of opinion share their views. Fiction and movies can also help us understand the multiple opinions and perspectives on an issue. Only when we are familiar with all shades of opinion, we can do a fair and critical analysis of the merits and demerits of an issue and come to the correct conclusions.
(g) Anchoring Bias
Whenever we have to make a decision, we want some reference point. So we often use an anchor or focal point as a reference or starting point to make a decision. This type of cognitive bias is known as the anchoring bias or anchoring effect. Psychologists have found that people tend to rely too heavily on the very first piece of information they learn, which may have no relevance to the problem at hand.
Tversky and Kahneman found that even arbitrary numbers could lead participants to make incorrect estimates. In one example, participants spun a wheel to select a number between 0 and 100. The volunteers were then asked to adjust that number up or down to indicate how many African countries were in the United Nations. Group A saw an arbitrary number of 10, and Group B saw an arbitrary number of 65. The median estimate in Group A was 25, and in Group B it was 45. In a similar study done by Dan Ariely and colleagues at MIT, participants were asked whether they would purchase various goods (such as wireless keyboards, bottles of wine, and textbooks) for the dollar figure equal to the last two digits of their social security number (SSN). After accepting or rejecting that price, they had to state the maximum price they were asked what they would actually be willing to pay for the item. It was found that the students with the highest-ending social security digits (from 80 to 99) bid the highest, while those with the lowest-ending numbers (1 to 20) bid the lowest. The top 20 per cent, for instance, bid an average of $56 for the cordless keyboard; the bottom 20 per cent bid an average of $16. [1]
It is said that something is better than nothing. So, when we are not aware of the price of something, any hint or reference serves as an anchor, and we estimate the cost using that anchor. However, if we have the correct information about the product, like the price, the anchors would not affect our assessment.
(h) Expertise bias
In modern times, there are numerous professions and most professionals develop a tunnel vision of the world. A popular idiom says, “If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” A professional is more concerned about his own business than the interest of their client. A doctor would be unhappy if people stopped falling ill. Similarly, an advocate would be jobless if people did’t fight with each other, didn’t break the law, lived peacefully and solved their problems themselves. The professionals are more interested in keeping the problem alive to mint regular money from their clients.
However, we are often swayed by the professional advice of the experts due to our trust in their knowledge and competency. While they pretend to help us, in reality, they are helping themselves by giving their advice. For example, most doctors would advise people to undergo regular check-ups, and consult doctors regularly, mainly to increase their own business. Hence, we need to take professional advice with a pinch of salt.
It is a good idea to check multiple experts or multiple opinions to broaden our knowledge base and reduce availability bias. We may then accept the common opinion among the experts, which is likely to be more authentic. If a part of the opinion is in the form of business promotion or extracting money from you, it is better to discard it.
(i) Dunning-Kruger Effect
Do you know the person with whom you spend your maximum time? Have you ever pondered whose thoughts you are most familiar with? The answer to both the questions is ‘you’. Hence, unless you are open-minded and develop the habit of appreciating the qualities in others, you are likely to overestimate your abilities.
Most people are confident about things about which they know the least. So, it is not surprising that a school teacher confidently tells you how to run a business, an auto driver gives expert advice about how to run the government, and an unmarried spiritual guru tells you how to lead a good family life. Bertrand Russell sums it up, ‘The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world, the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.’
When a person’s lack of knowledge and skills in an area causes them to overestimate their competence, it is called the Dunning-Kruger effect. This happens because these people have never tested their hypothesis or worked in those areas. Hence, they don’t know the complications of the job. So, for them, these jobs look very easy. However, professionals with wide experience in the specialised domain know the complexity of problems and the challenges to resolve them. Hence, most of us overestimate our ability to solve problems outside our domain.
Overcoming Availability Bias
It is essential to be aware of the missing information before deciding. You must deliberately search this material for a complete picture of reality. Instead of anecdotal truth, we must rely on data for rational decision-making. Hence, to counter availability bias, we must be careful about the information that frequently comes to our minds and instead collect the missing information to evaluate things rationally rather than emotionally.
Availability bias is also the result of our emotional brain trying to present a solution based on whatever limited information it has. It serves our purpose in most situations since we mainly deal with the same close-knit people about whom we have adequate information. So, while the information may not be universal and valid for the entire world, it is good enough for our small world. However, when dealing with the external world, we must collect a wider range of information to overcome our availability bias and make the right decisions.
Reference
[1] Ariely, Dan. Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape Our Decisions (pp. 41-42). HarperCollins Publishers. Kindle Edition.