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Availability Bias and Water Landings

Out of several million commercial flights, how many emergency water landings have there been?  One.  That's it.  Statistically speaking, none of us have any change of drowning after an airplane we were on crashed into the ocean.  It is literally more likely that lightning will strike you several times than it is that you will die while flying on a commercial airplane that makes an emergency water landing.Yet that one water landing occurred very recently, and so the availability bias comes into play.  The availability bias "is a phenomenon (which can result in a cognitive bias) in which people base their prediction of the frequency of an event or the proportion within a population based on how easily an example can be brought to mind."  Since we just had an airplane land in the water, something must be done about the "problem...continue to full post

Full post as published by Crime & Federalism on January 28, 2009 (boomark / email).