Mental Habits: Taking the Shortcut (Part 3)

In this third installment, I consider the a mental shortcut called "availability."

Let us now meditate on sharks, airplane parts, and the letters of the alphabet.

Are you more likely to be killed by a falling airplane part or by an attacking shark? If you are like most people, you would say that a shark attack is the more likely way to die. But, it is approximately 30 times (!) more likely that you will be killed by a falling airplane part. Are there more words in the English language that begin with the letter "r" or that have the letter "r" in the third position? If you were to bother to do the counting you would discover that there are more words with "r" in the third position. But most people say that there are more words with "r" in the first position. Why do most people get it wrong?

Those two problems look rather different. But they have something in common. In both, people use a mental shortcut called availability to solve them. When people use the availability shortcut, they pay attention to how easy it is to think of examples. In other words, they pay attention to how available the examples are. Let's consider the shark attack/airplane part problem. When a person is asked that question, she probably tries to think of recent examples of falling airplane part deaths and shark attack deaths. If she is anything like me, it is somewhat hard to think of airplane part deaths and easier to think of shark attack deaths. Examples of shark attack deaths are more available to her than are airplane part deaths. And so she decides that death by shark is more likely.

The same kind of thing happened in the "r" problem. It is far easier to think of words that begin with "r" than it is to think of words that have "r" in the third position. After all, we do not tend to remember words according to what letter they have in the third position. So, people come to the conclusion that there are more words that begin with "r."

Be Assertive

Some researchers conducted a simple experiment that shows the availability shortcut in action. Students volunteered for the study. Half of the students were asked to remember times they acted assertively. Those students were in the assertive condition.

The other half of the students were asked to remember times they had not acted assertively. Those students were in the unassertive condition. After that, all of the students were asked three questions about their assertiveness. The answers to those three questions were averaged. Each student had an assertiveness score. Scores could range from 1 (low assertiveness) to 10 (high assertiveness). Students with a high average score thought of themselves as assertive. Students with a low average score thought of themselves as unassertive.

But there is a twist that you need to know about. Half of the students in the assertive condition were asked to remember six times that they behaved assertively and the other half were asked to remember twelve times. The same thing happened in the unassertive condition. Half of those students remembered six times that they did not behave assertively and the other half of the students remembered twelve times.

Why six times or twelve times? Before they ran the study, the researchers found out that thinking of six assertive or unassertive behaviours is rather easy. But thinking of twelve behaviours is rather difficult. This fact is highly important. Here are the results of the experiment:

For now, only look at the left side of the graph. Those are the two conditions in which the students thought of assertive behaviours. Remember that thinking of six assertive behaviours is easier than thinking of twelve. The students who thought of six behaviours had a rather easy time. The six behaviours were easily available to them. And so they decided that they were rather assertive. The students who had to recall twelve assertive behaviours had a rather difficult time. The twelve behaviours were not easily available to them. And so they decided that they were not terribly assertive. The right side of the graph shows the opposite pattern. But this is only because those students were asked to think of times that they had behaved unassertively. The same thing was going on. The students who had to recall six unassertive behaviours had an easy time doing so. In other words, the six unassertive behaviours were easily available to them. And so they decided that they were rather unassertive. The students who had to recall twelve unassertive behaviours had difficulty. And so they decided that they were not all that unassertive.

Hold on a Second! (Again!)

In my next post, I'll return to an object I raised in Part II. Why did I show you how shortcuts can lead to errors when they are supposed to help you get through life? Stay tuned...

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