ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on a few common heuristics and biases which affect project management: availability, anchoring, representativeness, and others. The behaviors we describe for car-buying and smoking are examples of one such heuristic: availability. According to this heuristic, people make judgments about the probability of certain events based on how easily the event is brought to their mind. In our minds, we create certain categories and when we meet people who have certain attributes we try to fit them into these categories, though sometimes it has the same result as trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. People have a tendency to judge harmful actions as worse than equally harmful omissions. This bias often manifests itself when people are making decisions regarding safety and security. People sometimes think that the result of not reporting a potential safety violation is not as bad as actually breaking safety rules.
