Breaking Echo Chambers One Vodka at a Time
This is the availability bias in action
Hello! I'm JJ Pryor, the brain and heart behind Pryor Thoughts, a weekly digest spanning diverse topics — history, psychology, world cuisine, you name it! Each article is a journey, filled with humor, personal anecdotes, and a sense of discovery.
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There’s a funny side effect to being an ex-pat. They say “You can’t choose your family,” and in many ways, it’s the same for us.
You move to an unknown city in an unknown country and for a time—you are incredibly lonely.
Sure, if you get a good job at a good company, your new co-workers will make an effort to show you around and ingratiate you into their culture and lives, to a degree.
We all know work friends are great, but they can’t be your entire social network. Once the clock rings 5 pm, many of those friendships disappear for 16 hours until the next day on the battlefield.
One of my best friends I met while swimming at my condo’s complex. They had an overly strict HOA sort of thing, and as many of the apartments in the building were purely meant for renting, the rules were geared for least-amount-of-fun allowed.
One of the rules?
No alcohol around the pool.
And yet this place yearned to let me imbibe on a cool beer in the hot Singapore sun standing in this:
I mean. Come on!
And sure enough, my roommates and I went for a Saturday afternoon soak by the pool and my future friend waddled over with a bottle of water to say hi. Slurring his words only slightly, I asked “What’s in the bottle, friend?” and that sneaky bugger had it full of vodka and soda water.
I was one of the best men at his wedding 4 years later.
Yet, if I wasn’t an ex-pat, I never would’ve met this vodka-husking Dutch dude with far more conservative values than I exhume.
And what a pity that would’ve been.
Because I’ve made countless friends over the years being abroad in very similar fashions.
And of all the benefits they give me and vice versa, is something that’s combatting what I feel the world is once again turning to.
Compartmentalization
We think people—given enough time—make rational decisions based on facts.
In reality, our minds often betray us.
A friend of mine bought stocks in a company after reading three news articles about its success. No further research, no analysis, just plopped in a bunch of cash on one piece of news.
No surprise, the money went up in smoke.
Another acquaintance refused to fly for an entire year after reading about a tragic plane crash that made headlines all over the news. Vacations modified, weddings missed, FOMO through the roof.
She finally came to her senses—to attend a funeral.
Psychologists identified a cognitive bias that helps explain these irrational decisions.
This is the availability bias in action—and it might be turning us all into functioning idiots.
What is the Availability Heuristic?
Renowned psychologist Daniel Kahneman, in his influential book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, explains how the availability heuristic affects our decision-making.
“People tend to assess the relative importance of issues by the ease with which they are retrieved from memory—and this is largely determined by the extent of coverage in the media.”
It’s the tendency to base our judgments on the most readily available information, whether or not that information is actually true, can affect our lives, or is frequently occurring in reality.
Another good friend of mine took his family to Hawaii this year to kite surf in the gorgeous blue waters. When he got back, he couldn’t stop talking about how a previous couple rented the condo a few months ago, and the wife tragically died from a shark attack.
It didn’t stop him from going out in the water every day, but if I had to guess, that’s 90% of what he thought about while surfing and 30% when he got back.
Yet there are only 72 shark attacks annually, around the entire world, and only around 5 deaths.
But for my friend, this number must’ve felt like 5 million.
Another example.
The media loves showing us stories about people becoming mega-millionaires overnight in the lottery. It’s the new American dream, right? College is now just a prerequisite for Starbucks.
But of course, we all know the chances are infinitesimal you’ll ever win something big.
You’re more likely to date a supermodel (1 in 88,000) than win anything life-changing, with lotteries having sometimes less than 1 in 300,000,000 chance.
(Also, they don’t go broke, that’s a myth.)
Yet, we see the news of another record-breaking prize and we all diligently line up with our $5 to get a chance of a dream.
It might just be that we value that taste of a dream more than losing the $5, and so we keep doing this “neglect of probability” time after time.
But what if we weren’t reminded of the winners and winnings so often?
What if—shockingly—we were just allowed to take solace in our own hard work and the reward of our everyday lives?
If you own an interneted phone, that’s out of the question.
In today's world, social media and the constant influx of negative news make certain events seem far more prevalent and significant than they actually are.
This is the availability bias in action.
Negativity Sells
Just think of the ever-distracting and media-perpetuated versions of the “culture war”.
What is it today, mystical scary drag queens attacking children?
That idea won’t last too long.
Why?
Because of history.
I challenge you to think of what the culture war was yesterday.
Was it…
an attack on the religious “soul of America”?
environmentalists?
feminists?
women in uniform?
abortion rights?
removal of the Confederate flag?
taking down Confederate statues?
the war on Christmas?
taxpayer-funded art?
the Satanic panic?
LGBTQ rights?
same-sex bathrooms?
cancel culture?
woke culture?
BLM?
QAnon?
Take your pick, choose your side, it doesn’t matter—we are the ultimate losers anytime these topics dominate the news cycle.
Just ask yourself, is there a single issue in that list you aren’t familiar with?
Do any of them really affect your life?
If you’re a member of one of those communities I’m sure it does, especially when it’s on the wrong side of the media.
But when one of those issues pops up where you aren’t affected, not truly, I challenge you to stop and think about three things:
Does this actually affect me?
Should I take precious time out of my busy life to think about this more?
Is this just another action of an industry alliance designed to profit off of making me and my in-group as angry as possible?
Oftentimes, and seemingly more frequently these days, the answer to the last question is a resounding yes.
This is the availability bias in action.
My Friends Have Different Perspectives, and That’s Okay
I’m proud of the strange allotment of friends I have around the world. Some share almost the exact same values as me. Some have vastly different ones.
Some jokingly call me “woke” without knowing the history of the term. Communist. Far-left. Silly libta*d. Take your pick.
But these are just jabs.
I’ll shoot back with scary whispers such as “UBI” and “freedom of speech isn’t binary” and “Elon Musk is a human version of Taco Bell leftovers in the morning routine.”
We say these things because we are friends.
But more importantly, outside of the jibbing and jibing, we share our conflicting views.
We talk, openly, about why we feel one way or another about our opposing views. On rare occasions, it can lead to rising temperatures, but a quick change of subject or a sly joke slipped in cools the room right back down.
And it’s these conversations I cherish the most.
Because it gives me—and them—perspective.
Perspective that our fractured internet increasingly prevents us from having. It takes us out, even if just for a moment, from the echo chambers that have encapsulated and reinforced specific viewpoints.
Viewpoints that are often targeted against groups and not facts or opinions.
Viewpoints that go undebated, unchallenged, and confirmed by whatever expert is willing to get a nice tidy extra paycheck to appear on the news program du jour.
Viewpoints, that if you follow the rabbit trail just a few steps back, will inevitably lead to egregious money in the pockets of those who purvey them.
Some of my friends only watch Youtube videos to learn information. Some only read Google News. Some only watch Fox or CNN or TikTok or Twitter or you name it.
We all get our news from somewhere.
And when they aren’t diverse sources, even if we think they are reputable and indisputable, that is the availability bias in action.
We have a tendency to lock in our news with what we feel is right, or at least what we slowly learn is right according to our groupthink, inherent values, and our life experiences.
This tendency keeps many a news company in the black, and they’d have it no other way.
The problem is—in my view—it’s tearing at the very fabric of our society, all over the world.
And it’s for this reason that I love having conversations with my friends about every topic under the sun. We share perspectives. We break out of the echo chamber. And maybe, just maybe, we might learn something we didn’t know before.
It’s not good for the news industry though.
Because daily conversations like these are not the availability bias in action.
They’re the simple rebellion of having a vodka soda while wading through a pool on a bright sunny day.
They’re just part of being human.
Written by a JJ Pryor who deleted his social media apps off his phone 6 months ago.
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American media interests control much of the world's communication services, so, in consequence, America's hang-ups get more amplified exposure than those of other nations. It's not coincidental that those "culture war" subjects you brought up are almost exclusively American concerns and problems.
I found your Substack via an internet search wherein I was in the midst of doing one of my ever-widening line of inquiries. During my search one of the questions I had developed was "what is the most focused on topic/subject here at Substack?" This led me to the following article written by you- "The Top 40 Substack Newsletters by Organic Traffic, Who's who of the who." It was as close a result to the answer I was seeking that I could pull up during a first search, enough so that I decided to read it.
After I read it I naturally became curious about its author and their publication. Which of course led me to this article here; which resulted in my subscribing.
So for now I will keep my comment about this article short and simple.
There is no one of the named or similarly focused topics that directly affects me, and like you I recognize that for many people any one or number of the hyperbolical news items does have a such a direct personal effect.
That all being said, I for myself, am greatly concerned with the aggregate sum of these hyperboles and their consequential results, especially as seen in America's current cold civil war. This cold civil war is something that ultimately impacts the rest of the world, for it exemplifies the problems that can and are to be found in the rise of authoritarian, fascistic, and ultimately totalitarian mind-sets, from and towards which the goals and objectives of a few seek to dominate the many.
I am glad I found this article and do hope that we can engage in some deep, serious discussions; for the world today, as large as it might be physically, has become, due to the advances in technology, in so many ways very small; and it is up to a few of us who see the reality of Reality to work at maintaining a human existence that is genuinely reasonable, dignified, and beneficial for all concerned.