Availability heuristic provides us with the ability to quickly judge the likeliness of an event by the most outstanding memories we have associated with it. The Daily Show’s segment, “I Know What You Did Last Summer of the Shark” depicts how we can turn everyday occurrences into rare epidemics if the idea is influenced enough by the media or one’s own beliefs through their past memories of an event. The summer of 2001 was dubbed the “Summer of the Shark” because many new channels relentlessly covered the stories of shark attacks, making the viewer believe that sharks were much more dangerous that summer than any other. The Daily Show pokes fun of how easy it is for people to become terrified of ‘normal occurrences’ through availability heuristics. By overweighting easy-to-imagine instances of shark attacks, death from fallen coconuts, or even stair injuries, people will often remember these vivid experiences and will judge the likelihood of these events on how available they are in their memory. Repeatedly hearing about shark attacks will cause a person to believe that shark attacks happen much more frequent then they statistically do because the false information is readily available in their memory to call upon.
Thinking about it, I believe that availability heuristics often influences my behavior and the people around me. A few days ago when I was talking to my mother, I mentioned to her that I was going into the city to meet a few of my friends for dinner and I would be taking the ferry back at night. Immediately and without any delay, she tried warning me out of going to meet my friends. She quickly lectured me on how dangerous the city is in general but especially at night. She even asked me if I knew how many women have been kidnapped there because she apparently knew that it was, “more than she could count”.
Obviously, my mother has watched too many Law and Order SVU episodes because in her mind, NYC is absolutely the most dangerous place for me to go. I’m not neglecting the fact that the city is dangerous, but no more dangerous than it is for me to be driving, walking my dog, or really any other activity where I’m outside and susceptible to that event. Even though I knew my mother was overestimating the chances of me being abducted, it made me question if I really wanted to be alone late at night. Just like the “Summer of the Sharks” turning an average number of shark attacks into an epidemic, my mother made it seem like nearly every other woman in the city is abducted. My reaction to my mother’s availability heuristic correlations with Cass Sunstein’s phenomenon of “probability neglect” because, “we worry about remote possibilities while ignoring higher probabilities” (94).