Track your information exposure and adjust for its biases

What you see most is not what happens most — audit your information diet.

Why it works

The availability heuristic misfires most dramatically when the information environment is non-representative — when sources like news media systematically over-represent unusual, dramatic, and negative events. Because availability tracks mental access rather than real-world frequency, a biased information diet produces biased probability estimates. Knowing your information diet’s systematic biases allows you to apply a correction factor.

How to do it

1. List the primary sources from which you receive information about any risk or frequency question.
2. For each source, ask: "What does this source disproportionately cover? What does it systematically ignore?"
3. Apply an opposite weighting: if your source over-covers dramatic negatives, down-weight dramatic negative examples in your frequency estimates.
4. Seek sources optimized for base rates (government statistics, academic databases) for important probability estimates.

Evidence

Media framing research consistently shows that news coverage is heavily biased toward unusual, negative, and dramatic events relative to their actual frequency — a direct driver of availability-based probability distortion in the public. Soroka et al. (2019) found a cross-national, physiologically measurable negativity bias in reactions to news, evidence that a negatively skewed information diet is a systematic, not incidental, distortion to correct for. (observational)

Adjusting for information-source bias requires knowing what the source systematically misrepresents, which itself requires external reference data.

Sources

• Combs & Slovic (1979), newspaper coverage of causes of death, Journalism Quarterly
• Combs, B., & Slovic, P. (1979). Newspaper coverage of causes of death. Journalism Quarterly, 56(4), 837–849.
• Soroka, S., Fournier, P., & Nir, L. (2019). Cross-national evidence of a negativity bias in psychophysiological reactions to news. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 116(38), 18888–18892.

Common mistake

Believing you are immune to media-induced availability bias because you consume "quality" sources — all news-based sources are biased toward unusual events regardless of quality.