Availability-misweighing
We overweight what's vivid, recent and easily recalled.
The availability heuristic. When estimating the probability or importance of something, we use how easily examples come to mind. Vivid, dramatic, recent events feel more probable than dull, gradual, or older ones, even when the math says otherwise.
The bias is what makes people overestimate dramatic but rare risks (terrorism, plane crashes, shark attacks) and underestimate boring but common ones (heart disease, car accidents, slow lifestyle damage). It's also what makes recency overweight in strategic planning: the last big event in your industry shapes your thinking out of proportion to its actual long-term significance.
For operators, the defence is to ask, before any probability judgment, "am I weighting this by how often it happens, or by how vivid it is?" If the latter, dig into the base rate (see [base-rates]).
Examples in the wild
Boards spend most of their time on the last quarter's drama, even when long-term issues matter more. The recent crisis is available. The slow strategic drift isn't.
Investors flee or chase based on whatever happened most recently. The 2008 generation under-allocates to equities for life. The 2020 generation over-allocates to crypto. Both are availability.
Fear of flying scales with recent crashes, not with the actual statistical rate. The fear is rational on availability and irrational on math.
Availability-misweighing is one of the mental models we apply through real cases inside the Pareto MBA — a part-time program for professionals who want to think clearly about business.