EXAMINING THE ROLE OF AVAILABILITY HEURISTIC IN CLIMATE CRISIS BELIEF BY GUNAY KIRAN
E
very year, 725,000 people die from mosquito-borne diseases.1 This fact may not come as a surprise because the effects of malaria and other mosquito-caused diseases are well known due to their high coverage across global news networks. What about worldwide deaths caused by dogs? When asked to a room full of UC Berkeley students, estimates did not exceed a couple thousand. However, on average, rabid dogs account for 25,000 human deaths per year.1 Although many people would classify dogs as harmless compared to most other animal species, dogs are third on the world’s deadliest animals list.1 Human perception of the world is based on the information available to us at any point in time. Since news about dog-caused deaths is rarely covered on media platforms, we as humans classify
FEATURES
these types of canines as safe creatures. On the other hand, mosquitocaused deaths have a more pervasive media coverage, creating an accurate belief about the dangers of the species. This unconscious cognitive distortion of the human mind also applies to shark and hippo attacks. Since shark attacks appear more frequently in the media than hippo attacks do, many people tend to classify sharks as more dangerous. In reality, hippo-attack-caused deaths are roughly fifty times more common. This unconscious bias, known as a heuristic, is called the Availability Effect and is defined in Daniel Kahneman’s book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, as “the process of judging frequency by the ease with which instances come to mind.”4 One of the best examples Kahneman gives when explaining this phenomenon relates to Hollywood divorces. Since such divorces
FALL 2021 | Berkeley Scientific Journal
33
