Stanford University

PROMPT: The Stanford community is deeply curious and driven to learn in and out of the classroom. Reflect on an idea or experience that makes you genuinely excited about learning. (250 words) What’s more probable: dying from a shark attack, or dying from falling airplane parts? Surprisingly, the answer is falling airplane parts. But why does our intuition point us towards shark attacks? The answer lies in the availability heuristic, or the WYSIATI (“what you see is all there is”) rule, which describes how our minds evaluate decisions based on how easily we can think of examples to support…