availability bias examples — 5 i could not avoid

examples of the availability bias are, frankly, easier to find than the bias itself, which is, presumably, an example of the availability bias in action. i have made peace with this small recursive loop. i have not, separately, made any peace whatsoever with parsley as a concept or as an ingredient.

friday, 3:51pm. writing this from the third table at the coffee shop two blocks from the office, the one whose espresso machine sounds like a small jet engine in trouble. the company expects me back at four. the laptop is balanced on a table that is not level, with a napkin folded under one leg.

so. availability bias examples. that is the assignment. i typed those three words into the search bar at 3:38pm and the bar did what bars do — it offered me the cleanest version, near the top, with confidence i had not earned. the umbrella explanation is the larger pillar on a brain that mostly agrees with itself. this post is the smaller cabinet inside it: five examples, retrieved in five seconds, in roughly the order they arrived.

availability bias examples: availability bias examples include thinking plane crashes are common because the news repeats them, fearing sharks because of one summer in 1975, and treating your own broken microwave as proof appliances die quickly. the brain serves whatever is closest to memory and treats that as a sample. it is rarely a sample.

EASY. EXAMPLE. WINS. AGAIN.

availability bias examples, plain

plain version, before the coffee gets cold. availability bias examples are the cases where the brain serves whatever is nearest the front of memory and treats that as evidence. ease of retrieval is doing the voting. the textbook version is small. the desk version is enormous, because the desk version runs every minute of every workday and never asks permission.

the working working definition for the whole umbrella of mental shortcuts sets the rule in clinical handwriting. availability is one of the named varieties underneath it. the famous cousin is confirmation, which gets the marquee. availability does the double shifts. plane crashes feel common because the footage loops. shark attacks feel imminent because of one summer in 1975 nobody under fifty actually remembers but everyone under fifty has somehow inherited. parsley feels ubiquitous, in my private case, because i saw it twice in one supermarket aisle and the brain filed it under everywhere now.

the microwave example, again

the first of the available availability bias examples my brain produced this afternoon was — and i would like to apologise in advance — the seventh microwave. the one before this current one, which is alive and beeping and on its first month. the seventh microwave is, by now, a small gravitational force in my retrieval system. ask me to illustrate the concept of structural decay and the seventh microwave arrives within three seconds, holding a fork.

that is the bias, demonstrating itself in the act of trying to be illustrated. i did not reach for the strongest example. i reached for the one that lived closest to my front door, mentally. recency is the bias’s favourite drug, and appliances, in my apartment, are recency’s favourite hosts.

tom, my old college friend, who lives in a suburb with a pension whose font he likes, would have produced a different example without consulting anyone. tom would have said something measured about news cycles and amplified base rates. tom went home from university with most of the words. i went home with the ones i could throw at a microwave. for the longer take on this gap, see the post about whether becoming a smarter person is achievable by closing tabs.

the 47 tabs example, also again

the second of the available availability bias examples, lined up neatly behind the microwave, was the 47 tabs morning. the morning where i opened forty-seven browser tabs about becoming a smarter person and closed five and called it progress. the morning haunts me because i can still picture the screen — tab eleven was a forum, tab nineteen was a productivity man recently divorced, tab thirty-one was a five-step plan that dissolved on contact.

that morning is, in retrieval terms, an extremely available memory. it has texture. it has timestamps. it has a specific feeling of small-scale defeat. so when my brain wants an example of doing too much in service of doing nothing, the 47 tabs morning arrives before the alternatives can even queue. there are, presumably, better examples — historical ones, statistical ones, a study someone did in a building i would never enter — but those are not available. the 47 tabs are.

which is exactly the problem the bias names. one morning is not a sample. one morning is one morning. but one morning with that much texture wins every retrieval contest it enters. the practical follow-up, see the small workshop on the smallest unit of thinking i’m currently avoiding, makes the case that the only real fix is to slow the example down before you use it. i did not, this afternoon, slow it down.

the coffee example, the freshest one

the third of the availability bias examples arrived in real time, which is the funniest of the three. i was sitting at this third table, watching the barista work the steam wand, and i thought: this place is always packed at three. i had been there four times in three months. on three of those four times it was packed. on the fourth, which was a wednesday in february, it was empty. so the brain ran the math my brain runs, which is the wrong math, and concluded: three out of four. the place is busy.

three out of four is not a sample. three out of four is four visits. but the place feels, in my head, busy in the way a real fact is busy. the bias does not care about sample size. it cares about access time.

HT16: “all chairs are bar stools eventually.” i wrote that down in a notebook last year, at this same coffee shop, two seats over. it has aged into something i now believe. i believe it because i have said it three times in public, and saying a thing three times in public is, for most brains, the same as having checked it. the saying is the sample. the saying is also the bias.

mike has a bar example i forgot to write down

the fourth of the availability bias examples, in honest accounting, belongs to mike. mike runs the corner bar two blocks east of here. mike has been managing his tax situation, in his words, “manually,” for the past several years. mike is, on most reasonable metrics, not someone you would consult on epistemics. on this exact subject, however, mike is annoyingly precise.

i went to the corner bar last thursday and asked mike, between sips, for a clean example of the bias. mike said something close to: “the brain is a bartender at last call. it serves whatever is closest to the rail. that’s the whole job.” i wrote half of it down on a coaster. i lost the coaster on the walk home, which is, in itself, another small example of the bias — i remember the line because it was vivid; i forgot the second half because the second half was less vivid, and the brain quietly disposed of it.

mike’s version is shorter than the textbook version and does more daily work. that is his general gift. he will, presumably, repeat the line to a different customer next thursday and call it new. the line is good. the coaster is, somewhere, on the floor of an uber.

verdict, the examples were available, that was the bias

so the verdict, by the third table, with the espresso machine still doing its small jet noise, is that the bias supplied its own evidence in the act of being asked for evidence. i set out to list availability bias examples and the brain handed me, in order: the seventh microwave, the 47 tabs morning, the four coffee visits, mike’s coaster line. the textbook would have started with plane crashes and shark attacks. the textbook would have been, by all relevant standards, more correct. but the textbook was not at this table. i was.

there is a film called limitless, in which a man takes a tablet and is suddenly free of most of these retrieval problems. on this table, on this afternoon, there is no tablet. there is a flat white that has cooled past its usefulness, a napkin folded under a table leg, and the small ongoing realisation that the post i am writing about retrieval bias is itself a retrieval-bias product.