The Availability Effect

Start off by answering these few questions:

1) What color car is the most popular on the road? ...what's second?
2) What's the ratio of AIDS deaths to skin cancer deaths in the U.S.?
3) Which are more common in the United States: murders or suicides?
4) What percentage of U.S. troops in Iraq have been killed? ...wounded?
5) How many illegal immigrants successfully crossed our southern border today?

We often hear discussions about how biased the media is or how much media reports affect our perceptions of common events, but most people don't realize just how much their opinions are being shaped by the reports they read and those reports they don't read.

In psychology research, there is a cognitive phenomenon known as the availability effect that provides an unconscious bias in decision makers' opinion formulation process. Simply stated, the availability effect states that information that is easily accessible to our brains carries more weight in our decisions and judgments than information that is either absent or less salient. Thus, if you're walking down the street and you notice several red cars driving by, you're likely to think red cars are very prevalent on the road. (Silver or gray cars are almost twice as common as any other car in the U.S. The next most common colors are white, blue, and red.)

When we read articles or watch news clips in the media about news they choose to present, we're being exposed to information and being deprived of information at the same time. If the news program or television show chooses to talk about AIDS research and the terrible effects of this deadly disease, then we subconsciously assign more weight to the gravity of this problem than we do to other diseases - like skin cancer, asthma, or leukemia - that don't get as much airtime.

(In the United States, it's estimated that 40,000 people - mostly sexually active adults - contract AIDS and about 16,000 die from AIDS each year. More than 60,000 people develop skin cancer and 12,000 die from skin cancer each year in the U.S. More than 6,000 people die from asthma each year, and more than 22,000 people - mostly children - will die from leukemia in the U.S. this year.)

When you pick up the newspaper and read about violent crimes and murders, you're bound to think that they're commonplace, especially when compared to other causes of death such as suicides. (There are more than 500,000 cases of reported "attempted" suicides in the U.S. each year with more than 32,000 deaths from suicide - twice as high as the 16,000 murders in the U.S. each year.)

When you understand the availability effect and how it alters your judgments, it's easier to understand how much influence the media has over our perceptions and opinions regarding a war across the world. Though the daily bombardment we receive regarding the number of U.S. deaths in Iraq is harrowing and heartbreaking, it does not paint a very objective picture of the mortality rate for U.S. troops. It's estimated that the average number of U.S. troops killed in Iraq each year since the war has begun is under 800. (Please note that I'm not trivializing the number or value of lives lost in Iraq; I'm merely attempting to point out the effects of a cognitive limitation.) When you take that number as a percentage of U.S. troops who are serving in Iraq each year, the percentage of troops killed each year is less than one half of one percent. Those troops seriously injured each year is far greater (nearly 6,000 each year), but that number is still less than 4% of the troops in Iraq each year. -- What if the newspapers and TV outlets reported that more than 100,000 troops had successful and safe missions today in Iraq? What if the news reported on the tens of thousands of troops who have safe and happy interactions with grateful people of Iraq every day? The truth is that the news outlets don't care about the success stories and the safety of the vast majority of our troops because those stories wouldn't get on the front page.

Finally, another serious issue of which we hear very little centers on illegal immigration. Though the problem is often discussed in political forums, the staggering numbers are often difficult to understand. Best estimates put the number of illegal immigrants crossing the southern border each year at approximately 500,000. This means that there are nearly 1,400 people walking across the southern border every single day!

Our best estimates of the total number of illegal immigrants currently living in the U.S. is anywhere from 12 to 20 million people. Though that number may not sound too large in a country the size of the U.S., consider that only 2 of our 50 states - Texas and Calfiornia - have more than 20 million people living in them! Another disturbing way to look at that number is to think of the number of states that could be filled with illegal immigrants today. If we were to replace every person living in all of the following states with illegal immigrants, we still wouldn't have room for them all: Wyoming, Vermont, North Dakota, South Dakota, Alaska, Delaware, Montana, Rhode Island, Hawaii, New Hampshire, Maine, Idaho, Nebraska, West Virgina, New Mexico, and Nevada!

Remember this: whenever you hear or read a news report, you're not only hearing what they choose to tell you, but you're not hearing what they choose not to tell you.