Salience Bias, or Why it's Okay to Eat the Apple


Apples: they’re full of fiber, antioxidants, and vitamins. And yet, if your young child scored a homemade candy apple while Trick-or-Treating, there’s a chance you’d be telling them to discard that fruit at first opportunity. After all, remember that news story about malevolent weirdos hiding razor blades in their Halloween apples? Surely that’s important to keep in mind here.
Salience bias is the human tendency to evaluate situations based on the information available to us, regardless of how relevant that information may or may not be. What is the actual statistical likelihood that somebody in your neighborhood wanted so badly to hurt children that they inserted blades into a bunch of apples? (Keep in mind: basically every reported instance of adulterated Halloween candy has been a hoax, and no serious injuries have ever been reported.) By the numbers, it’s staggeringly more likely that your child would just enjoy a sweet, crunchy snack. But with that razor blade story weighing on your mind, it certainly seems like a useful data point to take into account when making your decision.
In a classic study in the seventies, two volunteers had a conversation, surrounded by a circle of observers. These observers were later asked to attribute the cause of various incidents to one talker or the other. By and large, the observers were more likely to point to whichever person whose face they could see better. By virtue of having a piece of information, that nugget feels important.
We see this in action all the time. It’s the reason you have to take off your shoes in the airport; after all, what about that Shoe Bomber story from a while back? That memorable example has had an outsized effect on how the TSA views shoes, even though logically, it seems unlikely that another terrorist is lying in wait for the day they can commit the exact same footwear-based attack. Shedding and scanning our shoes doesn’t make us safer; at best, it may briefly create an illusion of safety. ‘Precautions are being taken,’ we can tell ourselves, blithely ignoring any other, likelier sources of danger.
And here we see how the salience bias can have implications beyond just what Halloween treats your kid gets to take home. Operating under such false heuristics can severely distort the way we see—and respond to—the world.
So next Halloween season, remember salience bias, and go ahead: take a bite.


Check out Robb’s new book and more 
content at www.bestmindframe.com.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Robert Frost Quandary, or How Irrational Thinking Might Save Your Life

Image
You stumble out of the wilderness, having had no contact with humans for at least ten days. You’re weak from hunger and fatigue and you find yourself at a crossroads, power lines stretching out along each of the separate roadways. It’s decision time. You think about Robert Frost’s poem, and wonder if his advice to take the road less traveled might not just lead to your demise. What do you do, or more importantly, which brain system should you use to make this crucial decision? Daniel Kahneman, famed psychologist, winner of the Nobel prize for prospect theory and author of Thinking Fast and Thinking Slow might be the one guy to call, assuming your existential crossroads gets cellphone reception. Kahneman explains that we have two systems for making decisions. He refers to them simply as System 1 and System 2. System 1 is reflexive, automatic, and impulsive. It takes a constant reading of your surroundings and generates short-term predictions, all operating on a level beneath yo
Read more

Who Are You: Does Personality Change as We Age?

Image
Are you the same “you” that you were twenty years ago? Thirty? Forty? What about fifty years ago? While science still struggles to quantify, measure, and categorize personality, some have a different question: how stable is personality in the first place? Do the high school version of yourself and the retiree version of yourself still have some common immutable core? It depends how you look at it , says a paper by lead author Rodica Damian of University of Houston and her co-authors Marion Spengler of the University of Tuebingen in Germany, Brent W. Roberts of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and UH grad student Andreea Sutu. The paper in question goes by the catchy title “Sixteen going on sixty-six: A longitudinal study of personality stability and change across 50 years.” Damian and her colleagues compared the results for 1,795 U.S. adults who had taken a personality test as teenagers and then again, five decades years later. The team found that yes, there is a
Read more

The Best Painkiller Isn't What You Think It Is

Image
When we say that listening to the right song makes us feel better, usually we mean it in terms of emotions. However, a new study from the University of Utah Health suggests that combining certain painkillers with certain music boosts the pain-fighting effect of the medication a measurable amount. This recent bit of research was conducted specifically on models recreating two types of pain: inflammatory and post-surgical. (Nerve pain, or neuropathic pain, was not addressed.) Low doses of four medications were explored: ibuprofen, cannabidiol, levetiracetam, and NAX 5055. As for music, the researchers went with one artist only, while the control groups were given one of the four drugs and subjected to white noise. What music would you choose for optimal painkilling effect? The experimenters went with Mozart. (Interestingly, the phrase “Mozart therapy” already exists, referring to the beneficial effect ol’ Amadeus can have on patients with epilepsy. For instance, a 2018 st
Read more