The Art of Thinking Clearly: Better Thinking, Better Decisions

See also Scarcity Error (ch. 27); Endowment Effect (ch. 23); Alternative Paths (ch. 39);
Framing (ch. 42)

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83
HOW EYE-CATCHING DETAILS RENDER US BLIND
Salience Effect
Imagine the issue of marijuana has been dominating the media for the past few
months. Television shows portray potheads, clandestine growers and dealers.
The tabloid press prints photos of 12-year-old girls smoking joints. Broadsheets
roll out the medical arguments and illuminate the societal, even philosophical
aspects of the substance. Marijuana is on everyone’s lips. Let’s assume for a
moment that smoking does not affect driving in any way. Just as anyone can wind
up in an accident, a driver with a joint is also involved in a crash every now and
then – purely coincidentally.
Kurt is a local journalist. One evening, he happens to drive past the scene of an
accident. A car is wrapped around a tree trunk. Since Kurt has a very good
relationship with the local police, he learns that they found marijuana in the back
seat of the car. He hurries back to the newsroom and writes this headline:
‘Marijuana Kills Yet Another Motorist’.
As stated above, we are assuming that the statistical relationship between
marijuana and car accidents is zero. Thus, Kurt’s headline is unfounded. He has
fallen victim to the 
salience effect
. 
Salience
refers to a prominent feature, a
standout attribute, a particularity, something that catches your eye. The 
salience
effect
ensures that outstanding features receive much more attention than they
deserve. Since marijuana is the 
salient
feature of this accident, Kurt believes that
it is responsible for the crash.
A few years later, Kurt moves into business journalism. One of the largest
companies in the world has just announced that it is promoting a woman to CEO.
This is big news! Kurt snaps open his laptop and begins to write his commentary:
the woman in question, he types, got the post simply because she is female. In
truth, the promotion probably had nothing to do with gender, especially since men
fill most top positions. If it were so important to have women as leaders, other
companies would have acted by now. But in this news story, gender is the 
salient
feature and thus it earns undue weight.
Not only journalists fall prey to the 
salience effect. 
We all do. Two men rob a

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bank and are arrested shortly after. It transpires that they are Nigerian. Although
no ethnic group is responsible for a disproportionate number of bank robberies,
this 
salient
fact distorts our thinking. Lawless immigrants at it again, we think. If an
Armenian commits rape, it is attributed to the ‘Armenians’ rather than other factors
that also exist among Americans. Thus, prejudices form. That the vast majority of
immigrants live lawful lives is easily forgotten. We always recall the undesirable
exceptions – they are particularly 
salient
. Therefore, whenever immigrants are
involved it is the striking, negative incidents that come to mind first.
The 
salience effect
influences not only how we interpret the past, but also how
we imagine the future. Daniel Kahneman and his fellow researcher Amos
Tversky found that we place unwarranted emphasis on 
salient
information when
we are forecasting. This explains why investors are more sensitive to sensational
news (i.e. the dismissal of a CEO) than they are to less striking information (such
as the long-term growth of a company’s profits). Even professional analysts
cannot always evade the 
salience effect
.
In conclusion: 
salient
information has an undue influence on how you think and
act. We tend to neglect hidden, slow-to-develop, discrete factors. Do not be
blinded by irregularities. A book with an unusual, fire-engine red jacket makes it
on to the bestseller list. Your first instinct is to attribute the success of the book to
the memorable cover. Don’t. Gather enough mental energy to fight against
seemingly obvious explanations.