Vividness bias: why do we chase shiny objects and what can we do about it?
What is vividness bias?
My neighborhood is a quiet place. People walk their dogs and mow their lawns. The kid a few blocks overrides his dirt bike sometimes, but that’s it for loud noise. But judging by our neighborhood’s Nextdoor feed, you’d think I live in a kind of suburban hellscape. A cat was attacked. Was it a coyote? A truck was lingering at the end of the street. It looks suspicious; does anyone recognize it? A car was broken into last night. We need more police!
I don’t mean to make light of my neighbor’s problems. But the issue with Nextdoor is that it tends to collate the most sensational events in one feed. Scrolling through one after another can create the false perception that a community is much less safe than it is. A 2018 study concluded as much.
This is an example of the vividness bias, often referred to as the vividness effect.
In this post, I’ll talk about vividness bias and its impact on everything from the jobs we pick to what we remember, and what we can do to perceive reality more clearly.
What is the vividness bias?
Vividness bias is the tendency to give more weight to language, images, or memories that are emotionally compelling, surprising, concrete, or evoke our senses.
More abstract messages and ideas, like statistics or charts, fail to draw or hold our attention.
This may not sound particularly revelatory. We needn’t look further than the latest inflammatory Tweet from a public figure or the story about the gruesome murder that leads the nightly newscast, to confirm that vivid language and images are powerful. This makes sense. We’re story-driven creatures, and vividness infuses information with drama and excitement that leaves lasting imprints on our memories.
However, we can get into trouble when vividness bias tricks our brains and contributes to bad decisions. And, it’s easy to take for granted just how prevalent this bias can be in day-to-day life.
Vividness bias in action
Let’s take a look at some examples of vividness bias in action.
Decision Making
We’re more drawn to vivid and bold aspects when choosing between options.
Let’s say you’re deciding which college you want to go to. There are considerations like the quality of instruction, graduation rate, and how many graduates get jobs.
However, colleges don’t focus on these. Instead, they highlight the food, the fitness center, bits of quirky campus history, or the football team (like Clemson University, which saw a surge in applications after it won the 2016 National Championship).
The former indicates the quality of the education you’re getting, which can a massive impact on your life. The latter not so much. So why don’t schools focus more on the consequential stuff?
Because they know that people are more easily swayed by vivid stories and images than by statistical evidence. Tasty food, a sleek rec center, a funny anecdote, and a winning football team are far more vivid ways to promote the school than a bunch of facts and statistics.
Advertising
We’re more persuaded by vivid, bold, and dramatic images and messages.
A 2017 study found that psychiatric medications, like Xanax and Zoloft, were the most heavily advertised in the United States. They’re so common that you can probably picture in your head. A downcast woman slowly lowers her face to her hands. “Are you feeling exhausted, anxious, or hopeless?” the ad asks. This drug will solve the problem! Cut to the magical happy ever after, the woman is now laughing heartily, holding a glass of wine at a nice restaurant. All of her problems are solved.
I’m being flippant, I know. But the aforementioned study found that these advertisements increased sales significantly. In fact, psychiatric medications account for 10% of the 100 top-selling medications.
Performance Management
When assessing employee performance at work, managers tend to give more weight to vivid or memorable accomplishments. This means that an employee who underperforms on the less noticeable (but no less important) tasks but has one or two really spectacular successes can still get a great appraisal.
Sports
Vividness bias is prominent in sports and impacts the way we judge athletes.
The old saying “defense wins championships” may be true, but an appropriate corollary might be that it doesn’t get you paid either. A 2008 study of NBA players found that scoring weighed far more heavily than defense. Scorers were rewarded with higher salaries and received more All-Star votes than defenders, even though they might not necessarily contribute more to the team’s success than their teammates.
Risk assessment
When assessing risk, we tend to overweigh the probability of something happening based on how vivid it is.
Two common examples are the fear of flying and fear of shark attacks. Statistically, cars are far more dangerous than planes. The annual risk of being killed in a plane crash is roughly 1 in 11 million, while the annual risk of being killed in a car crash is about 1 in 5,000. And, statistically, falling coconuts kill more people than sharks every year.
The reason this happens is that vivid memories are easier to recall.
One more example. Let’s say I asked you how likely it is that your house would be broken into. If you’re like most people, you won’t know the stats off the top of your head. Instead, you’ll consult your memory: how hard is it to remember stories of your neighbor’s houses being broken into? If it’s easy, you’ll tell me the chances of burglary are high. If it’s hard, you’ll tell me they’re low.
This dovetails with the “availability bias,” which is our tendency to overestimate the likelihood of events with greater “availability” in memory. Availability can be influenced, among other things, by how emotionally charged they are.
What should we do about it?
The vividness bias is not a bad thing, per se. Biases helped our ancestors survive.
But today, we live in an environment that is saturated with information, and we’re up against algorithms that are finely tuned to our preferences and behavior.
Social media in particular has hijacked vividness bias. It surfaces images and messages and articles that keep us engaged, make us share, and keep us coming back. And it turns out that the most vivid content is the content that scares the crap out of us or makes us really angry.
One way to approach this is to know what is important to you before beginning to weigh your options.
This isn’t always possible. We make too many decisions every day for it to be realistic to sit down and spell out priorities for every choice you’ll encounter.
But for decisions that we make frequently (like what food to eat) or decisions that can have huge impacts on our lives (like where to go to college, or what job to take), it’s worth stepping back and spelling out priorities before dropping into the information jet-stream, where you’ll be bombarding left and right with vivid language and images.
Ultimately, it’s important to be aware of the way our brains work. Doing so allows us to reclaim some agency and control when forming perceptions, buying things, and making decisions.
