Decision making is a very interesting thing. Many people are naturally very good decision-makers, while others struggle with every little decision. People use different decision-making strategies. Some are very good at making quick on-the-spot decisions, and others are very good at taking time to weigh their options look at every possible outcome before making the correct decision. Many people, however, base their decisions on non-statistical information that doesn't correctly portray the statistical probability of an event happening.
The base-rate fallacy is based on the fact that people tend to be insensitive to probabilities and are more influenced by more vivid, dramatic events (Kassin, Fein, & Markus, 2008). An example would be someone deciding to drive across the country rather than fly because they have seen so many images and news reports of plane crashes where hundreds of people die. However, if one were to look at the statistics, they would realize that you are more likely to die driving in a car than you are flying in a plane. Stanovich calls this effect vividness (Stanovich, 2007). Those images of the plane crashing on the news with fire trucks all around a people panicking are much more vivid in one's mind than the car crashes that don't get televised as much. Therefore, people will be more likely to base their decisions off of the vivid images that come to their mind first.
My parents fall victim to the base-rate fallacy pretty often. The thing that first comes to mind when I think of this is what my parents think of my truck. When I was getting my first car, the one that I wanted most was a 2003 Ford F-150. I had wanted a truck like this for a long time, and we found a used one that was in very good condition and within our price range. We ended up getting it, but it took a lot of convincing on my part to get my dad to agree to it. He had a bad experience with a Ford car that he had, and since that time had been strongly against Ford. What bothered me was that the bad experience that he had was many years ago and was with a Ford car, not a Ford truck. However, that one bad experience made him turn against Ford forever, and to this day he still occasionally gives me grief about my truck and talks about how his Chevy has been running forever.
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The same thing happened with my car. I have a Volkswagen Beetle, and there have been a lot of cosmetic things wrong with it (things keep falling off inside the car). My parents say that they will never buy another Volkswagen, but they forget that they bought this one at some auction, and that a Volkswagen that I had previously owned had no problems.
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