Ever since I was 10 or 11, and I had internet at home, I had a passion for traveling. I wanted to see new countries, peoples and places. I used to log into Expedia.com and book fake trips with itineraries spanning all the places I wanted to travel to in my life. In high school, I made a list of countries which I wanted to visit during my lifetime and I am well along the list now.
But there is a problem with my travels. I am a very paranoid flyer, you see. I always worry about the planes crashing. When booking a flight, there are factors besides price and duration that I consider. For example, I look at the flight routes on flight24.com to determine just how long I will spend over water bodies.
Air travel is very safe. In fact, it is the safest form of transportation including when compared to walking. There is approximately a 0.0000001 (1 in 10 million) chance of an air passenger dying in a plane crash. The corresponding figure for walking is 0.002 and 0.01 for driving. Yet, I have not once thought about the possibility of dying on my drive to the airport or simply being run over when going for a walk, even though I have come dangerously close to being run over by a car and a tram.
My fear of flying over the open oceans (and long distance in general) was formed, I think, in the aftermath of the Air France flight crash that was flying from Rio de Janeiro to Paris. The plane disappeared over the Atlantic Ocean and was found weeks later. More recently, that has happened to Malaysian Airlines twice in quick succession. The odds of that happening were extremely low but those odds won out. This one event has compounded my fears even more.
I would very reluctantly book a ticket to travel on Malaysian Airlines or Iran Air due to their travel records. I once traveled over the Atlantic with Air France and I was paranoid during the entire flight and in fear. In contrast, I flew in the other direction over the Atlantic using KLM, which was an even longer flight, and I had a relatively good time on the plane.
My irrational behaviour is caused by what is known as the availability heuristic. Availability heuristic, a term coined by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky in the 70s, refers to the shortcut the mind takes to calculate the probability of events by how quickly and easily examples come to mind, i.e. how available information is (called ease of recall bias). But the result of this process does not necessarily have anything to do with the actual probability of that event occurring. Basically, we have a tendency to recall information that is more readily accessible and value that information more than it is worth.
The availability heuristic is one of a number of heuristics — rules of thumb or mental shortcuts we take in order to process information and make decisions faster — which cause humans to make irrational choices. Rational in this context is defined by the rational choice theory and is not used in its philosophical sense, which is broader and more accommodating. You may already be familiar with these as cognitive biases.
Thinking Fast and Slow, a book by Kahneman, digs further into these. But the gist of his thesis is that there are two parallel systems in our brains. He calls these System 1 and System 2. System 1 is in charge of the quick, emotional, routine decisions whereas System 2 is responsible for judgement as a result of rational processes in the brain.
These systems have developed out of necessity since we cannot process all data all the time in a thorough manner. Life moves at the speed of light and constantly debating rationality is not in keeping with that. We need methods to deal with the routine matters that don’t require much thought.
In my moments of fear when turbulence hits and I start preparing for a plunge, I do not consider all the information available to me, especially the statistics I presented before. In that moment of fear, rationality takes a back seat to my vivid imagination. On the flight to Paris over the Atlantic, I had a clear image of an Air France plane crashing in the Atlantic but not of a KLM flight. So even though it was a near-identical route I flew with both airlines, only one of them caused me stress.
As many people would tell you though, taking shortcuts comes with its own set of problems. The reason why this is a problem is because we do not consider all information available to us. Sometimes, jumping to conclusions that are unfounded can have practical consequences for society at large, with negative implications a lot of the time. “When something comes in a vivid narrative it increases the ease of recall. Ironically, we then believe rare events to be more likely than they actually are exactly because they are unique and stand out.”
Take for example the panic over Ebola in 2014 and even more recently. The chances of contracting Ebola is minuscule and even that number is halved when looking at the probability of dying from it (0.4). Of course, taking measures to protect people and prevent the spread of an epidemic is perfectly rational. What is less so is preventing Rwandan children in the U.S. from attending school because they had been in, and were from, Africa even though they had been certified healthy and Rwanda did not have any Ebola cases. In fact, there was a greater risk of contracting Ebola from an American than a Rwandan. But that did not matter because the media wasn’t focused on the cases in the US. And even then, the African origins of the disease did not escape mention. (That people usually consider Africa as a single location we’ll ignore for now.)
Using my travel example above, my irrationality is even more glaring taking into consideration my own travel history and air travel in general. There are approximately 100,000 flights in the air on any given day. Yet there are ‘only’ 135–155 plane incidents per year (in 2015, there were seven fatal crashes involving passenger aircraft). I think the foremost reason why I fear plane accidents is that once there is a plane crash, however low the probability, the chances of people surviving are much lower than all other forms of transportation, close to non-existent. It is this probability that causes me concern — even though it’s not directly related to the likelihood of an accident occurring in the first place.
Basically, “when something comes in a vivid narrative it increases the ease of recall. Ironically, we then believe rare events to be more likely than they actually are exactly because they are unique and stand out.” There are many who understand this and businesses, for example, draw benefit from the availability heuristic. That is one reason why we are bombarded with so much branding and information, to make sure we remember them when it’s time to make a decision. But that has its downsides too when crisis strikes. In the case of Malaysia Airlines, perhaps it could have survived the crash in Ukraine (in business terms) since it was attacked from the ground and had absolutely nothing to do with the airline. However, the unexplained disappearance of MH370 in combination with MH17, meant bad news for the company: the company has had 3 CEOs since then and had to fly near empty A380s.
Commercial interests aside, it is important to understand how our minds work in order to make better decisions. We need to understand our biases so we can counter them effectively and make rational decisions that are in our best interests. The answer isn’t to just turn a blind eye to all information in the public domain but to use all that is relevant to gain a full picture of any situation.
A good start is to read up more on this and other cognitive biases. The more of these you find out about, the easier it is to identify them in your behaviour, and increase your self awareness. Kahneman’s book is an excellent start but there are plenty of free resources on the internet as well.
