2. Mental Models
Overview
The Affect Heuristic is a clear example of substitution where an answer to a easy question (“What is my impression?”) acts as a response to a much harder question (“What do I think?”). This heuristic simplify our life by creating a much ordered world. In this imaginary world, good technologies have low costs, while bad technologies don’t have advantages and all decisions are easy. In reality this is obviously not true, and a compromise is needed.
Availability Cascade
The Availability cascade is the affect heuristic plus the availability bias in politics. Usually the flow is as follows:
- a media story captures the attention of a segment of the public, which becomes alarmed
- the emotional reaction becomes a story in itself, which in turn generates concern
- sometimes it is deliberately accelerated by “availability entrepreneurs”
- scientists or others who want to mitigate fear attract very little attention, mostly hostile
- the response of the political system is driven by the intensity of public sentiment