Use of the Availability Heuristic in the Democratic Debate

In psychology, heuristics are defined as mental “shortcuts” to help people remember and process information more quickly. One of the more common of these is the availability heuristic. Defined as “estimating the likelihood of events based on their availability in memory; if instances come readily to mind (perhaps because of their vividness), we presume such events are common”

O’Malley makes good use of this heuristic saying “And I ran and promised people that together we could turn that around. And we put our city on a path to reduce violent crime, or part one of crime by more than any other major city in America over the next 10 years. I did not make our city immune to setbacks. But I attended a lot of funerals, including one for a family of seven who were firebombed in their sleep for picking up the phone in a poor African-American neighborhood and calling the police because of drug dealers on their corner.” He then goes on to further explain how he lowered crime all around Baltimore.

O’Malley brings up this firebombed family to humanize the problem, and heroize himself. Instead of being seen as “The man who lowered crime rates in Baltimore”, he’s now “Presidential possibility O’Malley, who stopped families’ homes from being firebombed by lowering crime rates.” His achievement is also going to be that much more memorable, due to the human brain’s tendency to remember more vivid experiences (In this case a firebombed family’s funeral) over ones that are less so (numbers).

Throughout the entirety of the debate, all of the candidates made ample use of tactics like this one to try and make their achievements be that much more memorable than their competitors.