Page 157 - The Social Animal

Social Cognition 139

however, that you’ve never really thought about how assertive Neal
is. In this kind of situation, most of us will rely on how quickly and
easily an example might come to mind. If it is easy to think of one
vivid occasion when Neal acted assertively (e.g., “that time he
stopped someone from cutting in line in front of him at the movies”),
you will conclude that Neal is a pretty assertive guy. If it is easier to
think of an occasion when Neal acted unassertively (e.g., “that time
he let a phone solicitor talk him into buying a Veg-O-Matic for
$29.99”), you will conclude that he is pretty unassertive.
This mental rule of thumb is called the availability heuristic,
which refers to judgments based on how easy it is for us to bring spe-
cific examples to mind.There are many situations in which the avail-
ability heuristic will prove accurate and useful. Specifically, if you can
easily bring to mind several examples of Neal standing up for his
rights, he probably is an assertive person; if you can easily bring to
mind several examples of Neal letting people push him around, he
probably is not. The main problem with employing the availability
heuristic is that sometimes what is easiest to bring to mind is not
typical of the overall picture. This will lead us to faulty conclusions.
Let’s try something: Do you think more people in the United
States die from shark attacks or from falling airplane parts? Do you
think more people die from fires or from drowning? Think about it
for a minute.
When asked those questions, the overwhelming majority of peo-
ple report that deaths from shark attacks are more common than
those from falling airplane parts and that deaths from fires are more
common than those from drowning. In fact, both answers are wrong.
Why do most people believe these things? As Scott Plous suggests,
it is probably easier to bring to mind examples of deaths from sharks
and fires because these events are more likely to be covered in a vivid
manner on the evening news and thus are more available in people’s
memories. 36
Similarly, if you ask people to estimate the number of violent
crimes committed each year in the United States, you will get very
different answers, depending on how much prime-time television
they watch, as we learned in Chapter 3. People who watch a great
deal of television—and, hence, see a great deal of fictionalized vio-
lence—vastly overestimate the amount of real crime that occurs in
our nation. 37