Suddenly everyone believes –? Sounds like an availability cascade. Join me for 3 min on what it is and how to relate to it.
[click to view transcript]
I’m always looking for words that capture and describe complex topics. I learned a new one recently: availability cascade, from the very prolific legal scholar Cass Sunstein.
For those of you who only listen for 45 seconds, here’s how he defines it: “An availability cascade is a self-reinforcing process of collective belief formation by which an expressed perception triggers a chain reaction that gives the perception increasing plausibility through its rising availability in public discourse.”
For the rest of you, I want to put this in plain language and share a bit on what we can do about it. Sources below, as always.
The central concept of the availability cascade is the word cascade, and what Sunstein is describing is how beliefs are socially formed. Let’s say you have a group of 5 people sitting in a meeting room and one of them states confidently that, let’s say , drinking cold water will give you the flu. Now that doesn’t mean the other 4 people are going to believe it. But if person 2 goes, hmm, I can see how that makes sense. And then person 3 says you know, I did get the flu once after drinking a lot of ice water. Well maybe the 4th person isn’t sure, doesn’t care, or doesn’t feel comfortable speaking up. And maybe the 5th person even thinks it’s completely wrong. But you now have 3 people out of 5 giving affirming attention to the idea that drinking cold water gives you the flu. What sort of evidence does it take to have 4 out of 5 believing it? Unfortunately, not as much evidence as you might hope.
At some point, the situation becomes a cascade. The idea is given enough air time, enough attention, by enough people who are trusted and liked that it becomes just… true. In the world you live in, you have rational reason—based on widely available information and based on the trust you have for the people saying it—to believe that cold water gives you the flu. So an availability cascade, which can also be described as an informational cascade combined with a reputational cascade, is a perfectly reasonable pro-social behavior that shapes our beliefs.
Now if you want more on the cognitive biases, mental traps, and influence of bad actors that can turn a cascade into something harmful, you can read the full paper. I’m going to end with, adapted from this paper, how we can relate to cascades in a healthy way.
We all engage with other humans, even if it’s only online, so it’s unrealistic to think we can avoid cascades. We’re also all vulnerable to harmful cascades, especially when values or emotions come into play. So what matters is 1. When it’s realistic to do so, stop and consider why you believe something to be true, where did the belief come from; recognizing the influence of cascades is an important part of healthy engagement. And 2. Be very suspicious of beliefs that are large-scale yet not complex; when a point of view is both simple and explains a lot of things at once, it’s generally a sign that a cascade has gone wrong.
So the next time you’re about to agree with a point in a meeting at work, or about to re-share something on social media, remember the concept of the cascade. You are always potentially part of one, and you do get to decide what role you play. Thanks for listening.
Source: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1229439 (pdf available via Google Scholar)