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Availability Heuristic and Substituting Hard Questions

Summary

This episode delves into the cognitive bias known as the availability heuristic, which describes our tendency to rely on information that is most readily available—often what we’ve encountered recently or what is most salient. The host illustrates this with simple examples, such as how people often recommend a book they’ve read recently when asked for a recommendation, rather than the best book they’ve ever read. This heuristic is tied to our brain’s efficiency in retrieving relevant information, but it can lead to skewed perceptions and decisions.

The discussion extends to the workplace, using the example of a hypothetical coworker, Carl, who frequently proposes solutions based on the latest podcast or article he consumed. This behavior is framed not as a personal flaw but as a natural application of the availability heuristic, where recent learning becomes the most accessible reference point for problem-solving. The episode emphasizes that everyone is susceptible to this bias, and it plays a functional role in how we process information quickly.

A deeper layer is added by exploring how the availability heuristic combines with the representativeness heuristic, where we substitute a hard question (e.g., “What kind of person is this?”) with an easier one (e.g., “What was my most recent interaction with them?”). This leads us to form overarching impressions of people based on limited, memorable anecdotes rather than a comprehensive view. This process is common in professional settings, such as during hiring or team evaluations, where a single salient interaction can shape long-term perceptions.

The episode concludes with practical implications for engineering leaders and team members. Recognizing that opinions are often formed from limited data allows for greater skepticism and intentionality in evaluations. It also highlights the importance of recent and salient interactions in shaping how others perceive us. To influence perceptions positively, the advice is to focus on creating meaningful, recent experiences rather than relying on past stories that may no longer be relevant.

Recommendations

Communities

  • Developer Tea Discord — The host recommends joining the Developer Tea Discord community to discuss topics like cognitive biases and to get actual book recommendations from other members.

Tools

  • Miro — A collaborative online whiteboard platform that allows for emergent processes and creative thinking, especially useful for distributed engineering teams. The host mentions using it almost daily for strategy and collaboration.

Topic Timeline

  • 00:00:00 — Introduction to the availability heuristic experiment — The episode begins with a thought experiment comparing answers to “Can you recommend a book?” versus “What is the best book you’ve ever read?” The host points out that people often recommend a recently read book for the first question, not necessarily their all-time favorite. This discrepancy introduces the concept of the availability heuristic, where recent or salient information is more easily recalled and influences our responses.
  • 00:02:35 — Defining the availability heuristic and salience — The host formally defines the availability heuristic as the tendency to recall subject matter experienced recently. He adds the dimension of salience—how memorable or standout a detail is—using the example of a psychic suggesting that finding a heads-up penny is a sign. The salience of the “heads-up” detail makes the event more memorable, strengthening the availability of that experience in our minds.
  • 00:03:44 — Relevance to engineering and leadership — The host explains why the availability heuristic is relevant on an engineering leadership podcast. He introduces a simple workplace example: a coworker named Carl who frequently suggests solutions based on whatever he learned most recently, like a new tool or pattern from a podcast. This illustrates how the availability heuristic naturally affects professional decision-making, as people retrieve recent, relevant information to address current problems.
  • 00:09:54 — Substituting hard questions with easier ones — The discussion shifts to how the availability heuristic mixes with the representativeness heuristic. Instead of answering hard questions like “What kind of person is this?” we substitute easier questions, such as “What was my most recent interaction with them?” This leads to forming impressions based on limited, salient experiences. For instance, a single discussion where someone displayed technical knowledge might lead us to label them as technically competent overall.
  • 00:14:12 — Practical implications and takeaways — The host outlines the instructive value of understanding these heuristics. Recognizing that opinions are often extrapolations from small amounts of data encourages healthy skepticism, especially in processes like interviews. It also highlights the importance of self-presentation, as recent and memorable interactions significantly shape others’ perceptions. To change how people view you, focus on creating positive, salient experiences in the present rather than relying on past stories.

Episode Info

  • Podcast: Developer Tea
  • Author: Jonathan Cutrell
  • Category: Technology Business Careers Society & Culture
  • Published: 2023-11-03T11:00:00Z
  • Duration: 00:17:08

References

Podcast Info

Transcript

[00:00:00] We’re going to do a little experiment to kick off the episode.

[00:00:16] In your head, I want you to answer this question.

[00:00:19] Can you recommend a book to me?

[00:00:23] I want you to think about the disparity between these answers.

[00:00:34] The first question was, can you recommend a book to me?

[00:00:38] The second question is, what is the best book that you’ve ever read?

[00:00:46] What is the best book you’ve ever read?

[00:00:48] Many people, not everyone, perhaps you make it a habit to respond with the same book to

[00:00:56] both of those questions, but many people will divert.

[00:01:02] The book recommendation that they offer will be something that they’ve read recently.

[00:01:08] Maybe it came out recently, but it doesn’t necessarily rank if they were to take a step

[00:01:15] back and look at, historically, all of the books that they remember ever reading, the book that

[00:01:21] they recommended in the first question may not necessarily line up with the book they would say

[00:01:26] is the best. Now, in theory, these are two different questions.

[00:01:33] The first question may imply that I want a book that I haven’t heard of.

[00:01:42] Maybe a new book might fit that mold a little better.

[00:01:45] But there’s another reason that people tend to divert between the answers for these questions.

[00:01:52] We’ve talked about this particular heuristic in the past.

[00:01:55] It’s the same reason why if I say something like green truck on this podcast, then you’re more

[00:02:03] likely in the next couple of days to recognize a green truck.

[00:02:07] Another way that this can be exploited, if you were to go to, let’s say, a psychic, the psychic

[00:02:16] might tell you that any time you find a penny on the ground, especially if you find a penny that

[00:02:23] is face up, that is maybe a distant ancestor that’s trying to speak to you.

[00:02:29] The interesting thing is you’ll start finding those pennies with heads up.

[00:02:35] Why is that? This strange phenomenon is caused by something called the availability heuristic.

[00:02:43] And what this really is, is your ability to recall subject matter that you’ve experienced recently.

[00:02:54] And on top of the availability heuristic, we can look at another dimension called salience.

[00:03:00] That is, is it actually memorable? Does it stand out? How salient is the detail?

[00:03:08] So by adding the specific characteristic of that penny being heads up, rather than just a penny,

[00:03:17] you’re adding some kind of salience.

[00:03:20] There is some specific additional detail that creates an impression on you.

[00:03:27] And that impression, the depth of that impression, changes how long and how strong of an availability

[00:03:36] that particular experience provides.

[00:03:38] Now, why is it that we’re talking about the availability heuristic on an engineering podcast,

[00:03:44] the engineering leadership podcast, for those of you who are managers,

[00:03:48] this is absolutely relevant in your day-to-day work.

[00:03:52] I’ll give you a simple example, and then we’ll come back and talk about some more complex examples

[00:03:57] after we talk about our sponsor.

[00:03:59] A simple example of this is best represented by a story.

[00:04:02] And we’re going to make up a fake character, Carl.

[00:04:05] Carl is one of your co-workers.

[00:04:07] And Carl has this habit, and you’ve noticed this habit, where he will go and read hacker news,

[00:04:13] maybe listen to developer podcasts.

[00:04:16] He’ll pick up on something like, say, a new tool or maybe a software development pattern

[00:04:22] or refactoring, or maybe he starts listening to a particular author,

[00:04:28] and he starts getting really interested in that author’s opinions,

[00:04:32] maybe starts adopting their opinions.

[00:04:35] And in your next meeting with Carl, as you are identifying, let’s say,

[00:04:42] the root cause for a particular bug, maybe in a retrospective or a post-mortem,

[00:04:50] Carl raises his hand, and inevitably, in almost every case,

[00:04:55] Carl is going to bring up something from a recent thing that he learned.

[00:05:00] If Carl is listening to a podcast about NoSQL databases,

[00:05:06] Carl is inevitably going to recommend that we move to NoSQL databases for our product in the next retro.

[00:05:14] If Carl recently watched a YouTube video talking about an obscure bug

[00:05:19] dealing with memory overflows or something,

[00:05:22] then he’s going to inevitably mention the possibility that that bug is showing up in your code base as well.

[00:05:30] So Carl is not just a terrible developer that moves at the whim of every single thing he watches on YouTube or hears on a podcast.

[00:05:40] We are all a little bit like Carl.

[00:05:44] It is natural, and in fact, it’s helpful.

[00:05:47] It’s a functional part of our brain to retrieve recent relevant information.

[00:05:55] That recency is what makes this the availability heuristic.

[00:06:00] We’re going to take a quick break, and then we’ll come back and talk a little bit more about how the availability heuristic might show up in your work

[00:06:07] and what you can do, if anything, about it.

[00:06:14] I’m so excited about this sponsor.

[00:06:22] We talked about him in the last episode as well.

[00:06:24] Today’s sponsor is Miro, and I’m so excited because I use Miro almost every day at work, almost every single day.

[00:06:33] And in today’s episode, I want to talk about this particular aspect of Miro that I think makes it so compelling for engineering teams,

[00:06:42] especially if you have a distributed team in order to provide a place for you to think creatively together, for you to strategize together.

[00:06:53] And that aspect that I love so much about Miro is that it allows for us to have an emergent process.

[00:07:01] You can tell that this is not a read that Miro is giving me.

[00:07:04] An emergent process. What is that?

[00:07:06] Well, it’s really just a process that we change as we go.

[00:07:10] So many other tools that I’ve used in the past have a really strict, specific process.

[00:07:15] Maybe you can put cards in a column, but if you wanted to draw a picture, that’s not allowed.

[00:07:20] Well, with Miro, you can do pretty much anything you can imagine in the space that you have.

[00:07:26] So you may start out with guidelines.

[00:07:29] And in fact, there’s tons of excellent starter templates from both Miro official templates and community templates you can start from.

[00:07:38] But the templates don’t lock you in to a single structure.

[00:07:42] Your creative mind can emerge out of that structure.

[00:07:47] You can use Miro how you see fit.

[00:07:51] There are so many ways that Miro can get information in and also out.

[00:07:56] So it’s not like everything goes into the Miro board and then it’s gone forever.

[00:08:01] You can actually take that information and export it out to other platforms once you’ve done all of your creative thinking and strategizing.

[00:08:09] Miro has truly become an indispensable tool for me personally to think more clearly,

[00:08:15] but also to collaborate in a powerful and equitable way.

[00:08:20] Go and check it out. Head over to Miro.com.

[00:08:23] That’s Miro.com.

[00:08:34] Your first three boards are free at Miro.com.

[00:08:40] Thanks so much to Miro for sponsoring today’s episode of Developer Team.

[00:08:54] Another way that the availability heuristic shows up and it mixes with another heuristic called the representative heuristic,

[00:09:05] or representativeness heuristic is actually probably a better way to say it.

[00:09:10] The idea is that in order to build up your picture of a given concept,

[00:09:16] and in this case, we’re going to talk about a given person,

[00:09:19] in order to kind of conceptualize who does that person,

[00:09:25] you know, where do they sit in my professional life?

[00:09:30] You know, what kind of role do they play on the team or in the company?

[00:09:34] How do I interact with that person in order to build up that picture?

[00:09:40] We do this quick substitution, and this is really the kind of critical thing to understand.

[00:09:47] And we do this very often.

[00:09:48] We substitute an easier question, a question that our brain can answer without much effort.

[00:09:55] In order to be efficient, we substitute a reasonably close question,

[00:10:01] a question that can get us close to the real answer instead of that very hard question.

[00:10:09] So the hard question might be, what kind of person is this?

[00:10:16] How should I interact with this person?

[00:10:19] These are very difficult questions to answer on the fly.

[00:10:23] Certainly in the five minutes or 10 seconds that we might be prepping for our next meeting as a manager,

[00:10:32] we’re not necessarily doing all of that work to figure out where this person, where we kind of see them.

[00:10:41] Now, we might do that early on in our relationship, right?

[00:10:44] Especially, let’s say this is a person that you’ve hired.

[00:10:47] You’re doing a lot of understanding and learning about them, what they bring to the table.

[00:10:52] But then that freezes.

[00:10:54] And the availability heuristic that you use is, what is my most recent understanding of who this person is?

[00:11:03] So if you were a part of the hiring committee, for example,

[00:11:07] you may very well use information that you learned in that hiring process

[00:11:13] to answer the question about who is this person in the company in two or three years from now, right?

[00:11:20] So what we do is we do the substitution and we ask ourselves the easier question,

[00:11:27] which would be something like, what is my most recent interaction with this person?

[00:11:33] And how can I extrapolate that into a representative picture of who they are?

[00:11:40] So in other words, maybe you had a discussion with this person and they impressed you with their technical knowledge.

[00:11:47] Now, you don’t know for a fact that they actually have a depth of technical knowledge.

[00:11:52] You just know that in that particular discussion, they had a lot of technical knowledge about that particular thing.

[00:11:59] But because of the way that our brains extrapolate information and try to make the most of a little bit,

[00:12:05] you may now have this kind of overarching label or perception of this person as a technically competent person simply because of that one experience.

[00:12:17] So what our brains see as representative are actually just extrapolation summaries.

[00:12:24] These are, you know, substitutions for the real, more difficult question to answer.

[00:12:32] So we have this availability heuristic that pulls from our most recent experiences with somebody or pulls from a highly salient experience with somebody.

[00:12:41] Maybe it’s not even recent, but it’s the one that stands out enough to have made an impression.

[00:12:47] And now you can start to kind of piece together why things like first impressions actually do make a big difference.

[00:12:54] It’s because the most salient and memorable experiences we have with people tends to then be extrapolated and used as more representative explanations for who we are.

[00:13:08] This is illustrated by the kind of like cultural experience of asking somebody, what was this person like?

[00:13:17] And the person doesn’t necessarily respond with a list of traits.

[00:13:21] They may say a few things, but the most salient and kind of representative way to talk about other people is to provide an anecdote.

[00:13:32] This kind of story about how they operate it.

[00:13:36] What we’re doing is we’re giving somebody else the opportunity to then extrapolate from this representative story of a person to to use that available story, right?

[00:13:48] That availability heuristic, it’s right there in front of you.

[00:13:51] It’s easy to grok, to grasp.

[00:13:53] It’s easy for your brain to understand.

[00:13:55] Take that and extrapolate it and fill in the blanks.

[00:14:00] I don’t have the time to, you know, write an entire memoir for you.

[00:14:04] Here is a representative story of what this person is like.

[00:14:08] So how is this instructive to us?

[00:14:12] Well, it allows us to recognize that people’s opinions very often are simply extrapolations of very low amount of data, very small amount of information.

[00:14:27] This is useful in things like interviews.

[00:14:31] We have to use extrapolation in order to understand a person, but we also need to remain skeptical.

[00:14:39] Ask ourselves, are we actually substituting the hard question here, which is, can we predict how good of a candidate this is for an easier question, which is, does this candidate have a story that is representative of traits that we would like to have for this position?

[00:14:58] Once we know that people’s opinions very often are formed on that low amount of data and through the process of substitution, we can also recognize how important various aspects of our self-presentation and impressions are.

[00:15:14] Instead of viewing that as vanity, we instead might recognize that how we present ourselves in a meeting or the kinds of things that people might remember about us, they actually do impact the way that those people perceive us, the way that they might summarize how we fit into their work lives, into the team that we’re on, etc.

[00:15:37] So while we shouldn’t necessarily swing the opposite direction and become all about trying to present ourselves in a particular way, it does make sense to understand that people will likely summarize what we mean to them based off of our more recent or more memorable interactions.

[00:15:59] And so as you move forward, if you like for people to change their perception of you, then focus on the most recent interactions that you have with them rather than digging up some old story that maybe only you remember, focusing on the more present and the more salient experiences is going to be a better bet and a more likely opportunity for change.

[00:16:23] Thanks so much for listening to today’s episode of developer T.

[00:16:26] Thank you again to Miro for sponsoring today’s episode.

[00:16:28] Head over to Miro.com slash podcast.

[00:16:32] That’s Miro.com slash podcast to get your first three boards for free.

[00:16:37] Totally free.

[00:16:39] Miro.com slash podcast.

[00:16:41] Thanks so much for listening.

[00:16:42] If you enjoyed this episode, I’d certainly recommend that you join the developer T discord community because we talk about this kind of thing all the time.

[00:16:50] And by the way, we do actually have actual book recommendations happening over there.

[00:16:55] So go and check it out.

[00:16:56] Head over to developer T.com slash discord.

[00:17:00] Thanks so much for listening.

[00:17:00] And until next time, enjoy your tea.

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