Availableeity works by the rule, “If you can think of it, it must be important." Like any other heuristic on which the fast system relies, most of the time the heuristic of availability is very useful. For example, when somebody asks you, "What's the biggest city in Europe?" you may instantly say "London," not because you know for sure that it is the biggest city in Europe, but just because it first came to your mind. And you wouldn't be too far away, because London is the second biggest city in Europe, after Moscow. This is a situation when the availability heuristic works in your favour. On the other hand, there are numerous examples of this heuristic catching people off guard, and rushing them into unnecessary and irrational conclusions. Large plane crashes are one of the most shocking and media-covered events in the world. For days and weeks after this kind of catastrophe, the news is still full of reports about these kinds of events. And when you ask people, especially the ones who regularly watch news and reports, about the possibilities of car crashes and plane crashes, people tend to underestimate the possibility of a car crash happening, and overestimate that of a plane crash. This is because pictures of plane crashes are more readily available in their memories, and it is much easier to retrieve these images than those of car crashes, even though car crashes are much more common and deadly.Let's see another example. We all know that sharks are dangerous. Even if we neglect the negative impact Spielberg's film "Jaws" had on the beliefs around sharks, we can exemplify the heuristic of availability by the people's perception of sharks' deadliness compared to other animals. Most of us may make a great mistake if we were to assess the likelihood of a shark attack. Similar to the first example, because shark attacks are so dramatic, graphic, bloody, etc., they are "forced" by numerous news agencies, as they attract more viewers. Because of this, the memory of a shark attack is ready and steady in our brain, ultimately making us greatly overestimate the possibility of a shark attacking us, when, actually, we are more likely to die from falling plane parts. The sunk-cost fallacy is, simply put, a situation when people continue to invest in a failed asset, even though it is obvious that even the first investment was irrational, and that every subsequent one is sheer lunacy. However, often otherwise very sane people do this in order to avoid feeling regret and like they've made a mistake. This is, of course, a way to salvage a little bit of pride and to keep their ego intact. There is something called "The Concorde Fallacy," after the real-life situation that happened around the then-revolutionary model of airplane, Concorde, the joint project of the UK and French governments. Both governments continued investing in the project even after it became obvious that its economic sustainability was null, and that no one wanted to use Concord airplanes because they were so unsafe. However, because even the initial investments in this project were astronomical, it was almost impossible for high officials to admit their failure and abort the project altogether. Framing is one of the most interesting heuristics and biases, and the one widely employed by news agencies and media magnates. One of the best examples of framing is when we slightly alter a question to emphasize and attenuate what we want. For example, people will respond very differently to these two essentially identical questions: 1. "Would you consent to a medical procedure that had a 90% chance of survival? 2. "Would you consent to a medical procedure that had a 10\% chance of death? When we use the first way of asking the same question, we make the listener focus on the good side. Because of this, when we ask people if they would accept an operation that has a 90% chance of success, they are more likely to accept.On the other hand, with the second question, we emphasize the bad side: the mortality rate. This way, people become focused on negative characteristics and are thus more likely to reject the operation. In short, the way we ask questions is very important and can alter the response we'reloved to go to parties. But he was a bit skeptical before going anywhere because he wanted to "get the most of t^ prime His friends found it a bit difficult to coax him into going with them, but, eventually, the solution occurred to them. They simply asked him to go to the club with them and talked about how they had so much fun the last time they went out. They chose not to talk about the bad things that happened to them.
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