If you happen to chance upon this blog, make a guess on this:

On which continent do most of the world’s chronically hungry people live?

A) Africa

B) ASia

Chances are, you will probably pick A, the correct answer to this question is B.
This not a trick question, but an illustration of a cognitive bias- Availability Heuristic.

Cognitive bias are a pattern of deviations in judgement that occurs in situations that result in irrationality. Its occurrence of cognitive bias can be link to the inability of people to process every information received, also known as bounded rationality. The universal prevalence of cognitive bias showed that it could have an evolutionary basis, most importantly; it showed that cognitive bias is effective in its way. It cuts down on the time taken for decision making and saves us effort in considering all aspects to a problem before coming to a decision. However, such a rule of thumb way of approaching a problem is myopic as it may lead to inattention to other important aspects that are not conspicuous.

Availability Heuristic is a cognitive bias which people employ to help in daily decision making process that is effective most of the time. However, when it comes to risk assessments, the outcome is undesirable as it may lead people to form inaccurate judgement of the probability of risk occurring.

With that in mind, the purpose of this blog is to raise awareness of the existence of such irrationality in people, educate readers on the impact and prevalence of irrationality and how this affects decision making with regards to environmental issues.

Read on, explore the different pages to know more about how you make decisions and more importantly how your decisions may affect our environment.