www.AmericanSecurityToday.com September 2020 - Edition 48
The more often someone encounters
specific information,
the more readily accessible it is
in their memory.
If the news is full of privacy
breaches carried out by foreign
adversaries, that type of threat
will be top-of-mind, which
may drive leaders to overestimate
the likelihood of being
targeted with such an attack.
In reality, reports seen on the
news may not even apply to
their industry or may be an
extreme outlier (hence their
newsworthiness).
Still, availability bias may
lead them to hone in on potential
outside threats, perhaps
at the expense of more
urgent internal ones.
Availability bias is the human tendency to think that examples of things that come
readily to mind are more representative than is actually the case, which can ham-
per critical thinking and, as a result, the validity of our decisions.
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