My and my wife’s Midwife asked us if we were going to breastfeed. We said yes. She mentioned that sometimes you hear stories about how hard or bad it was to breastfeed, but while these stories are common, they’re more atypical than you might think because stories about successful breastfeeding don’t make good stories and are therefore not heard about very often.
What she was indeed warning us about was an availability bias (also called a heuristic). We oftentimes subconsciously assess the probability of something by how easily an instance can be recalled from memory. I don’t think she knew the term for it, but she was smart enough to warn us against such a bias.
In my normal life I see many many people violating this bias, but very rarely do I witness someone recognizing it or warning against it.
