I once saw a Twitter thread claiming that internet scams were extremely common and even arguably acceptable in Nigeria due to economic necessity and cultural factors. The replies agreed. This notion, widespread online, is absolutely hilarious to anyone who actually grew up in Nigeria.
Nigeria is Africa’s most populous country, with over 230 million people and counting. The reason you might think “419 scams” (named after Section 419 of the Nigerian Criminal Code) are common is because scammers are the Nigerians who email you. The average Nigerian isn’t emailing you.
If every Nigerian sent you a daily update about what they were up to, first of all, your inbox would crash under 230 million emails. Second, you’d realise how vanishingly small the proportion of actual scammers is.
But scammers might be massively over-represented in your exposure to Nigerians – doubly so in the early days of the internet. They’re also over-represented in media coverage and urban mythology – the “Nigerian Prince” became a cultural meme.
That said, it’s telling that the local term for these scammers – “Yahoo boys” – comes from an era when Yahoo email was a popular service.
Many of the young men who might have become Yahoo boys in the 2000s ended up working for Silicon Valley startups in the 2020s. But you don’t hear about them because they’re not emailing you.
This is base rate fallacy combined with exposure bias: we mistake “what we’re exposed to” for “what exists” because exposure is our only data source. The sample is so biased that we can’t see how biased it is.
Small numbers can lie
During the COVID pandemic, there was sudden panic that vaccines were causing blood clots in women. It took careful analysis to realise that the overall percentage of random women getting blood clots after vaccination was no different from the percentage getting blood clots on any random day.
The vaccine wasn’t causing clots. Women just get blood clots at a certain baseline rate, and when millions get vaccinated simultaneously, that baseline becomes visible and gets attributed to the vaccine.
Every plane crash makes international news. Cars kill 1.3 million people annually and barely get mentioned. You’re vastly more likely to die driving to the airport than flying, but exposure bias makes planes feel more dangerous.
Terrorism kills roughly 20,000 people globally per year. Heart disease kills 18 million. Terrorism dominates news coverage, making it feel like the greater threat when the base rates aren’t even close.
You hear legends of Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg as college dropouts who became billionaires. You don’t hear about the millions who dropped out and struggled forevermore.
Psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky called this the “availability heuristic”:We often judge probabilities by how easily examples come to mind.
Dramatic shark attacks make us overestimate the danger of sharks. Memorable plane crashes make us overestimate flight risks. The vividness of the example makes us overstate its frequency.
The myth of the medium
Social media magnifies this effect catastrophically. Extreme political views can easily dominate your feed. They lead you to the conclusion that your country is radically polarised.
In truth, most people offline are moderate and don’t post much. The only posts you see are from people who’ve already bought tickets to the game.
Extremes dominate not because they’re numerous but because they’re engaged.
The people locked-in to the culture war mini-metaverse are simply the ones who care the most about it.
If you’re tech-adjacent, you might think “everyone” cares about AI and cryptocurrency. But that’s just your exposure bubble. Most people don’t think about these things at all.
If you meet all your romantic partners through dating apps, you can easily develop a warped view of “what men/women are like”. In the process, you forget that dating app users are self-selected, and not representative of the general population.
When your last two dates exhibit a certain behaviour, you’re not seeing the likely behaviour of all viable dates, but specifically the ones who, being single right now, and having set their filters in such a way to find you, also happen to fit the filters you’ve set, and passed your bar for pre-date conversation.
How many of your beliefs about “the way things are” are actually just beliefs about “what you’ve been exposed to”? Where else might you be falling victim to exposure bias?
The things you see aren’t a random sample.
They’re filtered by algorithms optimising for engagement, by media selecting for drama, by your social networks reflecting your existing worldview, and by memorable exceptions that drown out boring norms.
Fake news and bad data are easy to swallow because they fit our naive misconceptions. Some things are easy to believe because we want to believe them.
