About the dangers of life experience

In life we run the risk at every step: health, money, property and, in General, destinies. When we have to evaluate the risks, we rarely have at hand the necessary statistical data and we have to draw conclusions based on their own experience. Psychologists have identified some General rules of risk assessment used by the people. It turns out that these rules under certain circumstances help to make the right decision, but sometimes can lead to errors. The fact is that people judge about the possibility and frequency of different events, they can easily imagine or recall examples of these events. Alas, often our memory offers us images recent or most popular, and rarely occurring usually comes to mind.

The availability of memories usually is decisive in the assessment of risk and creates in the mind a whole set of preconceptions. Thus, residents of flooded areas are heavily trapped by your negative experience, so the forecasting of potential flooding, they are strongly influenced by their memories, anticipating the future as a reflection of the recent past. These features of human memory is successfully used by insurance companies. The conclusion of insurance contracts from floods, earthquakes and similar natural events dramatically increases after such disasters, and then decreases gradually with the fading of people's memories.

In psychology a feature of human judgment about events based on the accessibility of memories of past experience is called the availability heuristic. A particularly important result of availability heuristics is that unlikely, but an unusual and striking event is better remembered and easier to recall, thus increasing their apparent riskiness. The availability heuristic brings to the fore the vital role of experience as a determining factor in risk assessment. If the experience of the person subject to prejudice, his perception is likely to be inaccurate.

Risk is a situational characteristic of activity consisting in uncertainty of its outcome and possible adverse consequences in case of failure. In psychology the term "risk" correspond to three distinct, but interconnected meanings:
1) the risk measure expected distress at the failure in the activity defined by the combination of the probability of failure and degree of adverse impacts in this case;
2) risk as an action that in some way threatening to the subject loss (loss, injury, damage);
3) risk as a situation of choice between two possible options: less attractive but more reliable, and more attractive, but less reliable (outcome of which is problematic and is associated with possible adverse effects).