Availability Heuristic: The Story Always Beats the Spreadsheet
You are standing in the ocean on a perfect day when something brushes against your leg. Your heart stops. A singular high definition image flashes into your mind. You see the poster for the movie Jaws. You scramble for the shore in a panic only to realize it was a harmless piece of seaweed. This reaction is primal and uncontrollable. It is also statistically ridiculous. You have a greater chance of dying from a falling airplane part than a shark attack but you never panic when a plane flies overhead.
The plane is a statistic. The shark is a story. This is the Availability Heuristic. We do not fear the unknown. We fear the easily imagined. Our brains judge the probability of an event not by data but by how easily we can recall a vivid example of it. If it bleeds it leads. If it is memorable we assume it is probable. The files at the top of our mental stack dictate our reality.
Why does the Availability Heuristic prioritize drama over data?
The Availability Heuristic prioritizes drama because the brain uses ease of recall as a proxy for probability and dramatic images are easier to recall than spreadsheets.
Our brains are not impartial search engines. We do not crawl the entire web of our experiences to find the most accurate answer. We are lazy librarians. We grab the file that is sitting on the very top of the stack. Three factors determine what gets put on top. These are Recency and Vividness and Narrative. This connects closely to the Recency Effect where the last thing we saw holds the most weight.
If your neighbor's house was broken into last night you will overestimate the crime rate in your city by a massive margin today. The statistical probability has not changed but your perception has shifted because the file is fresh. We remember high contrast images. We remember blood. We remember fire. We do not remember cholesterol. We do not remember high blood pressure. These are silent killers. They are abstract (and boring). A plane crash is vivid. A heart attack is a fade to black. Therefore we fear the plane but we eat the cheeseburger.
How does the news cycle exploit the Availability Heuristic?
The news cycle exploits the Availability Heuristic by operating as an industrial scale engine that feeds us continuous anomalies.
The news does not report on the world as it is. It reports on the world as it is interesting. Dog bites man is not news. Man bites dog is news. This old adage reveals a deep truth. The news reports on the exception. If you watch the news for an hour you will see a murder and a fire and a flood. Your brain absorbs this input and concludes that the world is a dangerous burning flooded place.
Steven Pinker has shown that we are living in the most peaceful time in human history. Violence and poverty and disease are down. But nobody feels like that is true. If you ask the average person if the world is getting safer they will say it is getting more dangerous. They say this because the peaceful day is not available to their memory. The violent event is looped on screens twenty four hours a day. We let the vivid nightmare dictate the mundane reality much like Confirmation Bias reinforces our fears.
How can you use the Availability Heuristic to win deals?
You can use the Availability Heuristic to win deals by replacing the customer's available fear of failure with a highly specific available story of success.
When you are selling a complex solution your biggest enemy is fear. The buyer is afraid the project will fail because they have a vivid memory of a project failing in the past. They remember the angry boss. They remember the wasted budget. That scar tissue is the available file. You cannot fight this fear with a feature list. You cannot fight it with an uptime guarantee. You must fight a story with a story.
You need to provide a Case Study that is so vivid and so specific and so relevant that it displaces the trauma memory. You need to say that you know they are worried about the migration. That is why you want to tell them about Company X. They had the exact same messy database. They were terrified. You must explain exactly how you moved them in four days without losing a single record. If you tell that story well you replace the available nightmare with an available success plan. You overwrite the file. You make the success available.
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