Illnesses such as diabetes and stomach cancer kill more than twice the number of Americans than murder or car accidents. However, Zale sees car accidents as more dangerous because he often hears about car accident fatalities on the nightly news, and he doesn’t know anyone with diabetes or stomach cancer. Therefore, Zale takes more precautions against car accidents. This exemplifies __________.

There are two biases emanating from the availability heuristic, also called the availability bias: Ease of recall and retrievability. The availability heuristic describes our tendency to think that whatever is easiest for us to call should provide the best context for future predictions, as it is the example in this case with Zale and how frequently he hears about car accidents and not about diabetes or stomach cancer. Availability heuristic argues that people sometimes judge the frequency of events in the world by how easy these events/examples come to mind. When forced to make a decision, we rely on what we think of first, which is a useful mental shortcut. However, this can have a disastrous effect as it undermines our ability to accurately judge frequency and magnitude. Ease of recall suggests that if something is more easily recalled in memory then it means that it must occur with a higher probability. The availability heuristic distorts our understanding of real risks by not taking into consideration other factors.