Availability Cascades

In the world of sociology, the “Availability Heuristic” says, in essence, that we tend to assess the likelihood of things based on our capacity to easily imagine examples and outcomes.

So rather than using a lot of cognitive energy to compute actual probabilities (and research real-deal facts and statistics), we tend to imagine possible outcomes and then whatever comes to mind most easily will shape our perception of likely outcomes.

It’s been argued that this is part of why violent crimes and similarly tactile threats seem more terrifying and possible than, for instance, dying of heart disease: we’ve seen so many muggings and other attacks on TV and in films that these sorts of hazards may come to mind more rapidly (and can be imagined more vividly) than the threats associated with a horrible diet and lack of exercise, despite the numbers saying we’re more likely to be menaced by and succumb to the latter.

An “Availability Cascade” is a theoretical means by which collective beliefs are disseminated and amplified.

In this context, that means the easy-to-imagine threat of violent crime might be spread from one person to another—the story of a mugging being told and retold and told again—which eventually makes that type of threat more front-of-mind for more people (those who hear about the original mugging, but also those who hear from friends of friends of friends of those who were mugged).

Over time, the perceptual likelihood of muggings grows because it’s one of the first and most poignant seeming possibilities that arise when we think about the hazards we face while going about our day.

In this way, the actual most pressing, dangerous things in our lives and environments can be overshadowed by things that are unlikely, because threats in that latter group seem more probable due to how easy they are to imagine: how “available” they are to the heuristics we use (in place of true probabilities and real-deal statistics).

This term can also be helpful in figuring out how beliefs are formed and how biases solidify within communities of people.

If we look at ideology-focused communities like political parties and track the spread of beliefs within such groups, we may find that support for a particular cause starts with a small number of people, spreads to others, and is then reinforced when folks in that group look around and discover that everyone else in their community seems to believe the same thing (because that spread has become so pervasive). This realization can then reinforce the availability of that belief (it’s easier to imagine when so many other people also seem to be thinking along the same lines), and that can then lead to the desire to spread it further, amplifying this effect while also making it wider-spread and more potent—the “cascade” component of this term.

One more useful term within this larger collection of terms is “Availability Entrepreneur,” which refers to people who are willing to invest themselves (or their resources) in flogging various beliefs and perspectives within such groups with the intention of creating this kind of cascade (which in turn is meant to promote various sorts of action).

If you want to get people to support a security-focused political party, then, you might transmit the concept of violent crime. If this concept (that there’s a lot of violent crime happening) cascades, making it seem like there’s more of such crime happening than the data actually show (and more people believing it because that idea becomes more available than the alternatives), that could lead to more votes for the party with the most prominent “tough on crime” messaging.

Politicians, community leaders, editorialists, and even journalists can amplify messages in this way, though it’s possible for these sorts of concepts (and concept carriers) to arise organically, as well—the “entrepreneur” label is typically applied to folks who help such things spread on purpose.

All of which serves as an interesting and potentially useful framing for how such messages spread and how they become vital to and pervasive within certain communities.

This also gestures at why we might want to be wary of such messaging when we notice it influencing our beliefs and actions (or those of our friends and family), and how we might halt or hinder this kind of reflexive thinking by focusing on real numbers and concrete evidence, rather than whatever seeming understandings are most available to our heuristics at a given moment.