Outside our immediate experience, we learn about the world through the media. Media coverage thus drives people’s sense of frequency and risk: they think they are likelier to be killed by a tornado than by asthma, despite asthma being eighty times deadlier, presumably because tornadoes are more photogenic.13 For similar reasons the kinds of people who can’t stay out of the news tend to be overrepresented in our mental censuses. What percentage of teenage girls give birth each year, worldwide? People guess 20 percent, around ten times too many.
