The Availability Heuristic, Universities, and Jason Arday

On the misleading effect of availability cascades

My topic is college and universities, and some things that people know, or think they know, about them. I will be arguing that particular stories about particular people can have an outsized effect on what people know, or think they know. The implications are general, but I will aim to focus on a particular domain.

Availability cascades play a big role. It will take me a little while to get there.

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How do we know what is true? About universities? About crime? About immigration? About climate change? About Yale? About Oxford? About Labrador Retrievers?

It is well-established that in thinking about risks, people rely on certain heuristics, or rules of thumb, which simplify their inquiry. Heuristics typically work through a process of “attribute substitution,” in which people answer a hard question by substituting an easier one.

Instead of asking what is true about some issue of constitutional law, people might use the Justice Clarence Thomas heuristic: What does Justice Thomas think? Or instead of asking what is true about the minimum wage, people might use the Senator Bernie Sanders heuristic: What does Senator Sanders think?

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When people use the availability heuristic, they assess the magnitude of risks by asking whether examples of harm can readily be brought to mind. If people can easily think of such examples, they are far more likely to be frightened than if they cannot. The result might be hysteria. Examples can be extraordinarily powerful, when and because they are available. Part of the power of stories lies in the use of the availability heuristic.

As Tversky and Kahneman put it, “a class whose instances are easily retrieved will appear more numerous than a class of equal frequency whose instances are less retrievable.”

Consider a simple study showing people a list of well-known people of both sexes, and asking them whether the list contains more names of women or more names of men. In lists in which the men were especially famous, people thought that there were more names of men, whereas in lists in which the women were the more famous, people thought that there were more names of women.

This is a point about how familiarity can affect the availability of instances. A risk that is familiar will be seen as more serious than a risk that is less familiar. But salience is important as well. Tversky and Kahneman again: “For example, the impact of seeing a house burning on the subjective probability of such accidents is probably greater than the impact of reading about a fire in the local paper.”

With respect to Labrador Retrievers, this ought to be salient:

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Tversky and Kahneman emphasized individual cognition. But examples spread though emphatically social processes. Every day, we see availability cascades, as one or another example becomes widely known through informational or reputational cascades.

One person hears about some event, and spreads it to another person, and the two spread it to a third - and soon an informational cascade might arise. Or one person imposes reputational pressure on another, and the two impose that pressure on a third - and soon an reputational cascade might arise. You can think of your favorite examples. (Intellectual fads and fashions, and left-wing and right-wing cascades, often arise in this way.)

Some people are very good at creating availability cascades. Some media personalities play a large role in them. (They might even be, well, availability geniuses.) Some public figures, including politicians and actors, benefit or lose from availability cascades. Some people’s lives are ruined by them.

Many people are motivated to use the availability heuristic. Motivated reasoning and the availability heuristic often march hand-in-hand. They might even be best friends.

Here’s an extended discussion of availability cascades and risks, by Timur Kuran and a grateful coauthor: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=138144&__cf_chl_tk=hCJAWPDs7w3N5cV_h_X7iFqGeTeigNGQm.xRNK3llYc-1787059005-1.0.1.1-fmVRHj1pEXa7h.w._YU7FkozqQBkCJlySwEXaTDKBRo

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Jason Arday, the Cambridge professor who engaged in plagiarism and various forms of dishonesty, died on August 14. It is an understatement to say that there has been massive international focus on Arday. He has been the subject of an availability cascade - no doubt about that.

One reason is that many people think, or like to think, or are gleeful to think, that he is representative of something they see, or like to see, as both terrible and pervasive in higher education: fraud, low standards, focus on diversity at the expense of quality, political bias, political correctness.

Once again: Particular stories about particular people can have an outsized effect on what people know, or think they know. Consider this possibility: Those who write and think about Arday, and focus intensely on him, may be influenced, and not for the better, by the availability heuristic. Insofar as they write or speak about him, they may be exploiting the same heuristic, and not for the better. (Recall: Motivated reasoning and the availability heuristic march hand-in-hand.)

They treat this horrible, tragic affair as if it defines Anglo-American universities, or Cambridge University, or the world today. So I’m not going to say anything else about it.

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We could think of countless people who might be taken to be representative of institutions of higher education. Many of them could be the object of an availability cascade.

Here are four random examples who spring to mind (in a tribute to the power of the availability heuristic):

• If you want to explore the work of a practitioner of social science in higher education, you should consider Leonardo Bursztyn, an economist at the University of Chicago. Bursztyn is massively original and astoundingly productive. Some of his work focuses on misperceptions about what other people think: We are often mistaken about the views of others, and when our mistakes are corrected, our own views shift. His work on this topic, empirical and theoretical, has major implications for politics, consumption, and social change. Some of Bursztyn’s work focuses on “product traps”: Many people use social media not because they like it, but because other people are using social media, and they don’t want to be left out. Product traps, it turns out, are everywhere.

• If you want to consider academic work in law, you would do well to focus on constitutional law and especially some of its “young turks” (or young-ish turks). Originalism and traditionalism are a big current focus - critical race theory is not. For example, Stephen Sachs is a law professor at Harvard. He is a leading originalist, that is, he thinks that the Constitution should be interpreted by reference to its original public meaning. He is also highly productive. He has written a brilliant paper on how to think about moral evils in the past, and on the perils of using contemporary moral values, even if we are committed to them, to evaluate the founding period.

• Sherif Girgis, at Notre Dame, is doing some of the best current work on the role of tradition and history in constitutional interpretation. He also explores tensions between originalism and traditionalism. He’s highly original, and he always makes the best, rather than the worst, of the arguments he’s confronting.

• Suppose that you are interested in psychology or (say) Cambridge University. Sander van der Linden works on misinformation and fake news, among other things, and he explores how to combat them. He has produced 34 papers in 2026, and counting. He’s immensely illuminating.

• These are four examples, as promised, but it would be easy to generate forty similar examples in economics, law, and psychology. It would not be so hard to produce 150 more.

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If you wanted, you could take Bursztyn as representative of the University of Chicago and economics. You could take Sachs as representative of Harvard Law School and academic law. You could take Girgis as representative of Notre Dame Law School and (again) academic law. You could take van der Linden as representative of social psychology, and also Cambridge University.

If you really wanted, you could emphasize that Bursztyn and van der Linden do not seem to be political in any way and that Sachs and Girgis seem to be on the political right (but do not make a big deal of it).

From that, you could, if you wanted, draw large lessons about the nonpolitical nature of work in economics and psychology. If you use the availability heuristic, you could use these examples to suggest that in economics and psychology, we are seeing a lot of careful empirical work from people who have no political ax to grind. You could say that in constitutional law, a lot of the best work is now being done by people who seem to be on the right (but who do not make a big deal of it).

Beware of the availability heuristic! Bursztyn, Sachs, Girgis, and van der Linden, while hardly household names, are exceptional. Still, they tell us a ton more about what is happening at colleges and universities these days, and even at Cambridge University, than does the highly publicized recent tragedy.