Misleading Vividness

The label was catalogued by philosopher Michael LaBossiere in his 1995 Fallacy Tutorial Pro, a Macintosh educational program later distributed through the Nizkor Project. The cognitive phenomenon it names had been studied empirically since at least 1973, when Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman described the availability heuristic — showing that easily imagined scenarios feel more probable, the same tendency that vivid anecdotes exploit when used to override statistical evidence.