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Risky Business
Skeptical Inquirer, March, 2000 by John Ruscio
The popular media capitalize on this power in many ways. Why, in a story on the effects of welfare reform on thousands of families across a state, does nine-tenths of the report consist of an interview with one affected individual? Why is the logic of "going beyond the statistics and onto the streets" to examine an issue persuasive to viewers, listeners, or readers? Producers are aware that a scientific analysis is not as emotionally compelling as one (carefully chosen) individual's personal experiences. Why does a television news reporter stand in front of a courthouse when sharing a landmark verdict reached earlier that day? Why does a weather correspondent endure frigid temperatures, sleet, and harsh wind on camera to inform us that a severe storm is in progress? Even superficial background elements appear to add a sense of realism and concreteness to a story.
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Having been exposed to a biased sample of vivid information through popular media outlets, what impact does this have on our subsequent decisions? Psychologists have discovered that our judgments of frequency and probability are heavily influenced by the ease with which we can imagine or recall instances of an event. Consider these two problems from the research literature. First, from among a group of ten people, are there more distinct ways to form a two-member or a five-member committee? Second, supposing that you have randomly sampled an English word from a text, is it more likely that it begins with the letter "k" or that "k" is its third letter?
Tversky and Kahneman (1973) found that participants in their studies systematically and predictably erred on both of these problems. In the first problems. In the first problem, it is perhaps easier to imagine forming smaller committees, which readily differ from one another, than larger ones, which overlap substantially. In fact, there are only forty-five ways to form two-member committees but 252 ways to form five-member committees. In the second problem, it is surely easier to bring to mind words that begin with "k" than words with "k" as the third letter, but extensive word-counts indicate that the latter outnumber the former by a ratio of roughly two to one. In fact, you might not have noticed that there have already been eleven words with "k" as the third letter in this article, but only one occurrence with "k" as the first letter--and even that occurrence could be disqualified on the grounds that it was a proper name at the beginning of this paragraph, "Kahneman."
What these exercises reveal is that our judgments are indeed biased by the ease of imagining or recalling information. In everyday life, what makes one event more available in memory than another? One crucial determinant is vividness. When we search through our memory to reach a judgment of frequency or probability, the most easily retrieved instances are often those that are concrete, personal, and emotional. Students in the course selection experiment, for example, are more likely to remember the views expressed by panelists than the comparatively pallid statistical summaries. Likewise, a news report will leave a more lasting impression by documenting one individual's personal suffering than by providing a scientific argument based on "mere statistics."
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