[This was originally a social post]
The biggest problem I see on social media is how often we confuse things that get attention because they represent something that happens often, and emerging that gets attention because it’s entirely unusual. One marks a pattern, one shares an outlier.
Legendary psychologist-duo Kahneman and Tversky have a name for why this melts our brains: the availability heuristic. If a vivid example is easy to recall, we start treating it like it’s common. Two viral stories that look similar in your feed, but mean totally different things:
- Ghost jobs: The memes hit because it’s a pattern. The Congressional Research Service defines “ghost” postings as roles that don’t exist or that employers aren’t planning to fill immediately. People share them because they’ve lived them.
- Aviation scares: The Alaska Airlines door-plug blowout was real and serious, and investigators found the bolts needed to secure the plug were missing.
But it’s also viral because it’s abnormal, not because it proves a new baseline. MIT research still finds commercial flying has been getting safer over time. Same “viral” energy, totally different signal.