Availability bias – doing things that are easiest to access and disregarding the fact that slightly harder things to access might have disproportionally higher outcomes.
One of the most impactful and overlooked biases.
Examples:
- I went to Thai restaurant and thought about my Thai friend. Then when I was driving with Uber I thought our driver is Thai (he was Indian)
- reading social media over important books
- “In Mischel’s marshmallow experiment ... the researchers compared the results of two situations: in one, children could see the marshmallow in front of them; in the other, they knew that it was there but couldn’t see it. On average, the children lasted only six minutes when presented with visible temptation but could manage ten minutes if the treat was hidden.” Can Brain Science Help Us Break Bad Habits?
- One click away is too far – Robert Wiblin append to his FB links either all of the content in the text field or a very long excerpt. I bet this increase reading the content by a lot.
- If you have two shelves in the room one with glass doors and one without it you will use things behind the door significantly less