Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases (Availability)
Amos Tversky & Daniel Kahneman · 1974
"People estimate how frequent or likely something is by how easily examples come to mind — which means vivid, recent, or heavily-reported events get judged as far more common than they actually are, while common but unremarkable events get systematically underestimated."
The mechanism is a mental shortcut: ease of recall stands in for actual frequency. Since dramatic events, plane crashes, shark attacks, terrorist incidents, get disproportionate media coverage and are more memorable, they come to mind faster than statistically far more common but mundane risks, like heart disease or ordinary car accidents, which distorts how people rank real-world danger.
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Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases (Anchoring)
"When estimating an unknown quantity, people rely heavily on the first number they're exposed to, the anchor, and adjust insufficiently away from it — even when that anchor is arbitrary, irrelevant, or explicitly randomly generated."