Given that this rogues gallery of Forbes covers has gone viral, it seems that many people are not aware of the availability heuristic. What is it?

In a nutshell it means that information we can more readily recall weighs more heavily in our decision-making. 

Most people think more words begin with “r” than have “r” as the third letter because they’re easier to remember, for example. We also overestimate the number of Hollywood divorces because we hear about them more. 

We also tend to ascribe our success to hard work because we are very aware of the obstacles that we have had to overcome. And we rely on first hand experience more heavily than other sources of information. If a friend had an extreme adverse event to a medical treatment like a vaccine, for example, this influences whether we get vaccinated far more than looking at a bigger sample size.

In the case of the Forbes covers, because over the last several years they featured Elizabeth Holmes, Sam Bankman Fried and Adam Neumann the conclusion is that Forbes only puts reprobates, con artists and fraudsters on the cover because we remember these people more easily on account of their misdeeds. But Forbes have probably done over 800 covers which makes these three individuals 0.375% of the sample size. An extremely low error rate indeed.

It’s not hard to see how this bias affects our decision-making. Mistaking what is recent and salient, or our first-hand experience for what is accurate, representative or statistically significant wreaks havoc with our risk calibration and judgement, often causing us to leap to the wrong conclusion or launch into erroneous courses of action.

Incidentally this topic and the hindsight bias — which is also heavily present in people’s reaction to the covers — are explained in some detail in my forthcoming third book, Mastering Uncertainty, so the timing is opportune!

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