 Tell me were they more males or females on that list? Well, it was a bit of a trick question. I think We had 48 Names in that list 48 faces 48 celebrities actually But of the 48 celebrities we had half of them were male and half of them were female and so There was no correct answer For the quiz but what we did do was we took the male faces Right, so the 24 males half of those 12 of those were famous celebrities So people might remember from the list. There was Brad Pitt Tom Cruz Steve Jobs right people things faces people that most everyone in the course would would recognize Now the thinking is here with this sort of experiment has been done time and time again But the idea here is that my bet would be that most people would have remembered the 12 males that were in that Original list, maybe not explicitly, but they may have remembered them And when they were thinking back to the list of males these people may have stood out now The female list the 24 of the females were all B grade celebrities for the most part So a few of them may they may have remembered but not many at all right, so when you're trying to make an estimate of Males relative to females in that list of faces Hopefully some of the males would have come to mind more easily And and the idea here is that it's that ease of processing that ease of sort of cognitive processing When thinking back to the males that went down a little bit easier and so people would would misinterpret That ease of processing for for the category being larger than the female category But are people actually remembering do they have a list of the celebrities in their head today? Do they do they remember Brad Pitt is that on the internal list not necessarily? I don't think it has to be explicit now There's another really good example that kind of highlights this what we can do is we can show students in the course these two letter strings Now the the letter string on the top and the letter string in the bottom and so what we want them to do is Estimate given these two letter strings how many words you can construct given the letters in these letter strings okay now even without Having any of those words come to mind People will quickly recognize that the letter string at the bottom will produce more words in the letter string at the top Okay, so it's exactly the same principle It's it's both of these examples are examples of the availability heuristic, right? Which is simply the number of instances that come to mind of that particular category and people Misinterpret the ease of processing Which could be due to any number of reasons as being indicative of the larger category I think this happens a lot in the media so we When we hear about deaths we tend to hear about shark attacks and and plane crashes and Terrorist attacks. We don't hear much about the people who died that night on the 6 p.m. News of asthma or heart disease So I'd be willing to bet that that people would pay Far more far higher insurance premiums to protect themselves From the things that they hear a lot in the media about how people die Versus what what what the base rates might actually show that people are most likely to die of now We have an example of this a couple of years ago in Brisbane There was a reasonably major flood and you and I had to to leave our homes and find someone else and it was a big mess And it took a couple of weeks to clean up, etc Now after that event I'd bet that the people who were directly Affected like we were by that flood and now far more likely to buy flood Insurance than people who are unaffected and I think they'd be far more willing to pay higher premiums for flood insurance But also over time as our memory fades of that event I think that willingness to pay those high premiums will will drop and people will be far Less likely over time to pay a lot for flood insurance Exactly, and so it's this kind of link between Availability the availability heuristic and risk perception has been demonstrated time and time again, and that's Absolutely the case and so in the media. Well, obviously the media is Extremely important in shaping our perceptions and the decisions that we make. I mean if all we hear about for example is As you said about homicides and about you know These sort of newsworthy deaths as opposed to things like heart disease or liver cancer and so on then we're going to have Enormously skewed sorts of perceptions about how common these types of deaths are and in fact That is the case if you were to ask people how likely it is that someone would die from a shark attack They would say that it's you know way more likely than it actually is At the expense of things like heart disease and so on which people really underestimate because they never hear about them You might hear about them with respect to family members or you know friends or something But when you're bombarded every night in the media by by these things. It's yeah exactly and so the media really shapes that and Danny Kahneman talks about this this idea of availability, but also the idea of availability cascades And so if there's a relatively minor event that happens say a tremor or something like that and and You have this news agency Who kind of blows it out of proportion makes it larger than it actually is then people start to freak out a little bit more Which then feeds more coverage Which results in people freaking out a little bit more and then it just kind of cascades and it gets worse and worse And in fact he talks about these Availability entrepreneurs these these people in these news agencies that kind of make a living out of doing this and so I mean that It's it's never been more important I think to to consider what's where we're getting our information and What sort of information we're exposing ourselves to because that fundamentally shapes the way that we see and perceive the world and if all we're doing is surrounding ourselves with kind of Second-rate news then we're kind of at the at the whim of these these types of agencies