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
See also
- Availability Bias, frequency is judged by how easily examples come to mind not by actual count — the availability cascade is the political-scale version: emotional salience drives perceived frequency, which drives perceived risk
- Affect Heuristic substitutes “what do I think?” with “what is my impression?” — the cascade is the affect heuristic at societal scale: collective impression replaces collective reasoning
- Narrative Fallacy makes us explain the past through cause-and-effect — the media story that triggers the cascade is a narrative: causal, simple, focused on extraordinary events rather than base rates