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Tell me: where there more males or females on that list?
Well, it was a bit of a trick question, I think. We had 48 names in that list, 48 faces,
48 celebrities actually. Of the 48 celebrities, we had half of them were male, and half of
them were female, and so there was no correct answer for the quiz.
But what we did do was we took the male faces, the 24 males, half of those, 12 of those were
famous celebrities. People might remember from the list there was Brad Pitt, Tom Cruise,
Steve Jobs, people—faces that most everyone in the course would recognize.
Now the thinking here with this sort of experiment—it’s been done time and time again—but the idea
here is that my bet would be that most people would have remembered the 12 males that were
in that original list—maybe not explicitly, but they may have remembered them—and when
they were thinking back to the list of males, these people may have stood out. Now the female
list, the 24 of the females, were all B-grade celebrities, for the most part, so a few of
them they may have remembered but not many at all.
So when you’re trying to make an estimate of males relative to females in that list
of faces, hopefully some of the males would have come to mind more easily. The idea here
is that it’s that ease of processing, that ease of cognitive processing when thinking
back to the males that went down a little bit easier, and so people would misinterpret
that ease of processing for the category being larger than the female category.
But are people actually remembering? Do they have a list of the celebrities in their heads?
Do they remember Brad Pitt? Is that on internal list?
Not necessarily. I don’t think it has to be explicit.
Now there’s another good example that highlights this. What we can do is we can show students
in the course these two-letter strings: the letter string at the top and the letter string
at the bottom. What we want them to do is estimate, given these two-letter strings,
how many words you can construct given the letters in these letter strings. Now even
without having any of those words come to mind, people will quickly recognize that the
letter string at the bottom will produce more words than the letter string at the top.
It’s exactly the same principle. Both of these examples are examples of the availability
heuristic, which is simply the number of instances that come to mind of that particular category.
People misinterpret the ease of processing which could be due to any number of reasons
as being indicative of the larger category. I think this happens a lot in the media. When
we hear about deaths, we tend to hear about shark attacks and plane crashes and terrorist
attacks. We don’t hear much about the people who died that night on the 6 PM news of asthma
or heart disease. I’d be willing to bet that people would pay far higher insurance
premiums to protect themselves from the things that they hear a lot in the media about how
people die, versus what the base rates might actually show the people are most likely to
die of. We have an example of this. A couple of years
ago in Brisbane, there was a reasonably major flood. You and I had to leave our homes and
find somewhere else. It was a big mess, and it took a couple of weeks to clean up, et
cetera. Now after that event, I bet that the people who were directly affected, like we
were, by that flood are now far more likely to buy flood insurance than people who were
unaffected, and I think that they’d be far more willing to pay higher premiums for flood
insurance. But also, of the time, as our memory fades of that event, I think that willingness
to pay those high premiums will drop, and people will be far less likely over time to
pay a lot for flood insurance. Exactly. So this link between availability,
the availability heuristic, and risk perception has been demonstrated time and time again,
and that’s absolutely the case. Obviously the media is extremely important in shaping
our perceptions and the decisions that we make. If all we hear about, for example, is
as you said, about homicides, about these sort of newsworthy deaths as opposed to things
like heart disease or liver cancer and so on, then we’re going to have enormously
skewed perceptions of how common these types of deaths are. In fact, that is the case.
If you were to ask people how likely someone would die from a shark attack, they would
say that it’s way more likely than it actually is, at the expense of things like heart disease
and so on, which people really underestimate because they never hear about them. You might
hear about them with respect to family members or friends or something but…
Yes, when you’re bombarded every night in the media by these things…
Yes, exactly. So the media really shapes that. Danny Kahneman talks about this idea of availability
but also the idea of availability cascades. If there’s a relatively minor event that
happens—say, a tremor or something like that—and you have this news agency who blows
it out of proportion, makes it larger than it actually is, then people start to freak
out a little bit more, which then feeds more coverage, which results in people freaking
out a little bit more. It just kind of cascades, and it gets worse and worse. In fact, he talks
about these availability entrepreneurs, these people in these news agencies that make a
living out of doing this. It’s never been more important, I think,
to consider where we’re getting our information and what sort of information we’re exposing
ourselves to because that fundamentally shapes the way that we see and perceive the world.
If all we’re doing is surrounding ourselves with second-rate news, then we’re at the
whim of these kinds of news agencies.