sharma ji bias

A few months ago, my cousin Shraddha called me in tears.

She'd just watched the viral video of Flight 171 crashing seconds after takeoff from Ahmedabad. The grainy mobile footage went viral across every WhatsApp group in India within hours. 

"I'm canceling my Goa trip," she said. "Flying is too dangerous now."

I tried explaining the statistics. Nearly 180,000 people died in road accidents in India last year. That's equivalent to a fully loaded Boeing 747 crashing every single day.

Yet she drives to work daily without a second thought.

"That's different," she insisted. "I'm in control when I'm driving."

That conversation made me realize something profound.

Priya wasn't being irrational.

Her brain was following a predictable pattern that affects every major decision we make in life.

She was experiencing the availability heuristic in action.

The availability heuristic was discovered by psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman in 1973, work that later earned Kahneman the Nobel Prize.

Their breakthrough experiment was deceptively simple: they asked people whether more English words start with the letter K or have K as their third letter.

Most people incorrectly chose the former. Words starting with K are easier to recall, even though K appears as the third letter three times more often in English.

This revealed something fundamental about human judgment: we estimate probability not by analyzing data, but by how easily examples come to mind.

Your brain processes information through two different systems.

Dramatic, emotionally charged events trigger the amygdala, flooding your system with stress hormones that "tag" these memories as critically important.

Meanwhile, abstract statistics like "0.06 aviation fatalities per million passengers" activate only the prefrontal cortex without emotional enhancement.

The result?

A single viral video of an airplane crash carries more decision-making weight than decades of safety data showing you'd need to fly daily for 15,871 years to statistically encounter a fatal accident.

This neurological architecture made sense in ancestral environments.

If your ancestor remembered the location where a tiger attacked more vividly than abstract statistics about tiger populations, they'd live longer.

But in today's media-saturated world, this same mechanism creates a profound mismatch between perception and reality.

After understanding this, I started noticing the availability heuristic everywhere.

Especially at Indian family gatherings.

Last Diwali, I watched this pattern play out in real time.

My uncle was pressuring his son Arjun to choose engineering over graphic design. "Look at Sharma ji's son," he said. "IIT Delhi, now he's VP at Microsoft. That's a real career."

The numbers tell a different story.

India produces around 15 lakh engineers annually, but only 2.5 lakh find core engineering jobs. That's barely 16.7%.

48% of engineering graduates remain unemployed or work in completely unrelated fields.

Yet engineering remains India's most sought-after career path.

Why?

Because of the availability heuristic at scale.

The handful of IIT graduates heading global corporations are infinitely more memorable than the millions struggling in oversaturated job markets. 

Parents don't discuss the 42% of engineering students who never find placements or the fact that only 3.4% of engineers are employable in IT product companies.

They remember Sharma ji's son who got into Google.

Meanwhile, Arjun has genuine talent in graphic design.

The creative industry is growing at 25% annually. UX/UI designers often earn more than most engineers.

But these facts can't compete with the vivid success story that comes to mind every time someone mentions "career stability."

The availability heuristic isn't just affecting individual families.

It's systematically misallocating India's human capital on a massive scale.

The scariest part?

Technology has weaponized the availability heuristic.

Research analyzing over 53,000 messages found that fear-based content spreads three times faster than factual information across WhatsApp groups.

Videos comprise only 3% of total messages but account for 52% of viral content.

When aviation incidents occur anywhere in the world, the amplification is immediate and overwhelming.

Within hours, multiple "last moments" videos circulate across Indian family groups, most recycled from previous incidents but presented as current news.

My aunt’s WhatsApp group shared a "Singapore Airlines crash" video that was actually from a 2019 Kosovo-Switzerland flight.

It gained 400,000 views in our extended family network alone.

Travel anxiety content on platforms like YouTube sees 300-500% spikes post-incident.

Meanwhile, the 400+ Indians dying daily in road accidents generate no viral content, no family forwards, no influencer discussions.

A single aviation incident receives more media coverage than months of road fatalities because smartphones mean instant dramatic footage for any plane incident, while road accidents remain abstract statistics.

This digital amplification has real consequences.

After every viral aviation video, domestic tourism drops, families cancel trips, and the aviation industry loses crores while the statistically far more dangerous road travel increases.

The availability heuristic's financial impact is quantifiable and devastating.

During the March 2020 COVID crash, the Sensex plummeted 3,934 points in a single day, erasing ₹19 lakh crore in market value.

While foreign institutional investors made statistically-driven decisions, domestic investors, driven by recent pandemic fears, made emotional choices that destroyed wealth.

This pattern repeats predictably. After high-profile market events, mutual fund redemptions spike: equity fund assets dropped 25% from February to March 2020.

Gold investment demonstrates the same bias. During uncertainty, gold ETF inflows surged 400%, despite gold's 20-year returns being nearly identical to Nifty 50's.

Indians consistently overweight gold during crises, with recent geopolitical tensions driving decisions more than statistical return comparisons.

Even more striking: research shows that availability bias affects investment decisions across all asset classes, with investors focusing on recent dramatic events rather than long-term statistical patterns.

After watching the availability heuristic shape so many life decisions around me, I started building systematic defenses against it.

The most effective technique is reference class forecasting or deliberately seeking statistical base rates before making any major decision.

Instead of asking "what memorable examples come to mind," I now ask "what do the numbers say about similar situations?"

When friends ask about career advice, I research employment data for all graduates in that field, not just memorable success stories. For investment decisions, I focus on 20-year return patterns across multiple market cycles, not recent dramatic events.

Professional domains that successfully counter availability bias offer proven frameworks. Aviation uses structured decision-making protocols that force pilots to consider statistical probabilities regardless of recent dramatic incidents.

Medical professionals use differential diagnosis protocols requiring them to consider multiple explanations, not just the most memorable recent case.

For personal decisions, I created a simple checklist: What would someone who never heard the recent news decide? What would I advise a friend in this exact situation? What does the historical data show about similar cases?

Your brain will always find dramatic events more available than statistics. The question is whether you'll let that availability determine your major life decisions or build systems to give boring numbers their say.

Hit reply and tell me: What's the most dramatic story that shaped one of your major life decisions? Looking back, what do the statistics actually say about that choice?

I read every email.

Until next week,
Ritesh