The Science of Fear: How the Culture of Fear Manipulates Your Brain

by Daniel Gardner

One of Gut’s simplest rules of thumb is that the easier it is to recall examples of something, the more common that something must be. This is the “availability heuristic,” which I call the Example Rule. Kahneman and Tversky demonstrated the influence of the Example Rule in a typically elegant way. First, they asked a group of students to list as many words as they could think of that fit the form _ _ _ _ _ n _. The students had 60 seconds to work on the problem. The average number of words they came up with was 2.9. Then another group of students was asked to do the same, with the same time limit, for words that fit the form _ _ _ _ ing. This time, the average number of words was 6.4. Look carefully and it’s obvious there’s something strange here. The first form is just like the second, except the letters “i” and “g” have been dropped. That means any word that fits the second form must fit the first. Therefore, the first form is actually more common. But the second form is much more easily recalled.