Chapter 118 Question 106

Why does Cornell University, whose actual suicide rate is clearly far below the national university average, bear a bad reputation for having a high student suicide rate? (Fanson Tigler) The suicide rate at Cornell University is ○. ○43%, half of the national average suicide rate for college students.But it has long been rumored that Cornell has a high suicide rate.Why is reality so different from rumors? According to Carney and Tversky, people estimate things using heuristics, or rough reasoning as they're called empirically.For example, if people try to estimate the frequency of a particular event, they mostly use the availability heuristic, that is, if examples of such things are easy to remember, then the event is more frequent.On average, the availability heuristic also makes sense, because certain types of things happen so often that it is easy to recall examples.

But we remember one thing not just because it happens frequently.The prominence of the event is also a factor.We now have a rough idea of ​​why Cornell is believed to have a high suicide rate.At other universities, students commit suicide in relatively mundane ways, such as overdosing on sleeping pills.But Cornell happened to straddle both sides of the deep Grand Canyon, and many students jumped off the bridge to commit suicide.Traffic near the bridge was blocked for hours as the rescue team hung ropes down the canyon to retrieve the bodies.So when people think about whether Cornell has a high suicide rate, they don't hesitate to say yes, because it's so easy to pull examples from memory.And if the student died of an overdose, unless people knew the person, they couldn't think of an example.