Availability Bias: Overweighting What Comes to Mind

Newsrooms once ran over a thousand stories on shark attacks in a single summer—during a year when fewer than ten people worldwide actually died from them. So why do rare dangers feel huge, while everyday risks barely register? Let’s press pause on your instincts and start unpacking that.

You don’t just misjudge dramatic threats; you also misjudge yourself. In one classic study, people who listed 12 examples of their own assertive behavior actually decided they were *less* assertive than people who listed only six. Straining to recall more instances made assertiveness feel rare, so they quietly rewrote their self-story to match the feeling.

This is availability bias turning inward: when your memory search feels easy, you assume “this happens a lot”; when it feels hard, you assume “this is unusual”—even if both impressions are wrong.