The difference between the risks we perceive and reality is often due to one or several of these mental shortcuts we use to understand the world:
- What's easy to imagine or remember (availability heuristic)
- What can be seen or easily predicted (certainty heuristic)
- How much we feel we're in control (controllability heuristic)
For example, traveling by car can seem safer than by plane: we're behind the wheel (control) and we all have in our minds images of terrible plane crashes (availability).
Yet, far more people die in road crashes in the US than in commercial aviation (in the US, the death rate per passenger-mile is about 1,200 times as high for passenger vehicles as for scheduled airlines).
Taking base rates into account and, more generally, pausing to examine our first impressions can help us make better decisions.
- The difference between the risks we perceive and reality is often due to one or several of these mental shortcuts we use to understand the world: - What's easy to imagine or remember (availability heuristic) - What can be seen or easily predicted (certainty heuristic) - How much we feel we're in control (controllability heuristic) For example, traveling by car can seem safer than by plane: we're behind the wheel (control) and we all have in our minds images of terrible plane crashes (availability). Yet, far more people die in road crashes in the US than in commercial aviation (in the US, the death rate per passenger-mile is about 1,200 times as high for passenger vehicles as for scheduled airlines). Taking base rates into account and, more generally, pausing to examine our first impressions can help us make better decisions.