Paul Slovic Character Analysis

Kahneman speaks about the availability bias—which reasons that we estimate frequency of an event based on our ability to come up with examples of that thing—in terms of risk and judgment. A team led by Paul Slovic asked people to estimate various causes of death, and often people would overestimate causes of death that were, as Kahneman explains here, covered more often by the media—which itself bases its coverage on different, interesting, and poignant events. Thus, we are readily influenced by the media because we are overconfident in the things that we have personally seen or heard about (this also has to do with the WYSIATI concept). Hearing about someone struck by lightning on the news, for example, makes the idea of death by lightning more available to us, and thus we tend to overestimate the frequency of that event. This has real-world consequences in that we are very affected by events like acts of terrorism (and that fear or worry can drive public policies), even though vehicle accidents are many times more frequent, for example.