Understanding Cognition: Availability Heuristics - A Fallacy Of Memory

Are there more regularly used words in the English language that start with the letter 'k'; or more with the letter 'k' as the third letter?

answer below.

Sometimes your cognitive biases act as a double edged sword, in that they can be both helpful and harmful to your continued survival in certain situations.

The availability heuristic is one such example. For instance if you answered the question that I asked above instinctively, the chances are you believe there are more popular words that start with 'k', than have 'k' as their third letter.

But as you may have guessed by now, the opposite is true. There are far more words with 'k' as the third letter, than begin with 'k'.

The reason that you, and almost anyone who is asked that question answered it in that way. Is because it is easier to remember words that start with 'k' - kitchen, knife, kettle and knave.

Yet it is much harder to remember words with 'k' as the third letter, such as acknowledge, bake, like, or cake. Of course once you start thinking about words with the third letter being 'k', you can't stop!

Marketing Availability

If I were to ask you to, as quickly as you can, name a sports shoe brand, and then I asked you again to name another one. The chances are the first time you would say; Nike or Adidas. The second time you would name the one of the two you didn't name the first time.

This is because these are the two biggest sports shoe manufacturers in the world, and therefore are the ones that are most available to your memory.

Nike and Adidas spend more on advertising than all of the other sports brands put together. Therefore you will most likely think of these brands when buying sporting goods.

This means that they are so prevalent within society, that they don't even have to put their name on an advert for you to know who the advert is by. Everyone knows what the Nike swoosh, or Adidas stripes look like.

The Politics Of Availability

Availability heuristics are why allowing political parties to spend as much money as they want on advertising is such a flawed system.

This is because during an election campaign, if you are an undecided voter who is mainly exposed to favourable stories to one particular politician. Then you are likely to vote for that person.

The reason being that the availability heuristic is a hierarchical type bias. In other words the things you can easily recall to mind, take a higher position of importance.

Politicians use this all the time to manipulate the electorate. Say for instance an interviewer asks a politician about what they are going to do about the growing pollution problem in their constituency. In this situation the politician knows that whilst it is an important problem, they can deflect the conversation (and the voters' attention) onto something less important, yet more high profile.

So the politician might answer that question like so;

Of course pollution is important, but I want to talk about the disgusting attack on that poor taxi driver the other day. I promise to stamp out disgusting attacks like this in the future!

In this scenario a taxi driver was attacked and it was all over the news. The guy almost died and it was indeed a horrible attack. However attacks on taxi drivers are not that common in this fictitious town. But the fact that everyone is talking about it, ensures that the matter seems much more important than pollution. Because specific incidences of pollution will be harder to bring to mind.

Availability: Friend Or Foe?

Of course there is a very good use for the availability heuristic. If for instance we were in a room and there was a sudden urgent need to leave it. Then you would most likely go to the entrance you entered with, or the last one you saw.

In other words this is a cognitive bias which helps greatly in snap decision making. Whereby spending time pondering on the decision could seriously harm your chances of survival.

However we must remember when making purchasing or political decisions, the availability heuristic bias can cause us to ignore more important issues because they are harder to remember than things that are potentially less important.

The key to breaking this bias is doing a bit of research. Sure, after doing the research you may not change your mind.

You may still think that Nike do the best sports shoes and that Donald Trump is the best politician of all time. But at least (hopefully), you'll be basing those decisions on things that were a little harder to find out, and didn't just spring to mind.

By doing so we free ourselves from the tyranny of availability and set ourselves on the path to making better, more informed choices.

Public Examples Of Availability Heuristics

After the 1970s JAWS film about a killer shark, many people believed that shark attack was inevitable and refused to go swimming at the beach. - Actual Fact: There are on average 16 shark attacks each year in the United States, roughly 40 globally. Most are not fatal.

Most people believe 'fake news' is a problem caused by the mainstream media releasing fake stories, and therefore trust of mainstream media is at an all time low. Actual Fact The biggest fake news stories of 2017 originated from individual Twitter accounts and independent sites like Inforwars, which broadcast to 750,000 followers on Facebook about a 'category six' hurricane (Irma). There is no such thing as a category six hurricane.

Further Reading:

Availability: A heuristic for judging frequency and probability - Cognitive Psychology issue 5 - pages 207-232 - Science Direct

Availability heuristic - Wiki

WHAT WAYS IN PARTICULAR DO YOU THINK AVAILABILITY HEURISTICS MIGHT EFFECT YOUR LIVES AND DECISION MAKING? CAN YOU REMEMBER A TIME WHEN AN EASILY RECALLED FACT OVERSHADOWED A MORE IMPORTANT HARD TO REMEMBER ONE? AS EVER, LET ME KNOW BELOW!

Title image: Jamie Street on Unsplash

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