"In this article, we’ll examine the phenomenon of bounded awareness—when cognitive blinders prevent a person from seeing, seeking, using, or sharing highly relevant, easily accessible, and readily perceivable information during the decision-making process. 'The information that life serves is not necessarily the information that one would order from the menu,' notes Dan Gilbert of Harvard University’s psychology department, 'but like polite dinner guests and other victims of circumstance, people generally seem to accept what is offered rather than banging their flatware and demanding carrots.'...

It’s important to note that bounded awareness differs from information overload, or having to make decisions with too much information and too little time. Even when spared a deluge of information and given sufficient time to make decisions, most individuals still fail to bring the right information into their conscious awareness at the right time."

"Making decisions about risk and uncertainty is hard. For instance, trying to think through the probability of catching a potentially deadly virus while going to an indoor movie theater is difficult. So people tend to think in terms of binaries — 'this is safe' or 'this is unsafe' — because it’s easier.

The problem is that answering easier questions instead of trickier ones leaves you vulnerable to cognitive biases, or errors in thought that affect your decision-making.

One of the most prevalent of these biases is the availability heuristic. That’s what psychologists call the tendency to judge the likelihood of an event based on how easily it comes to mind. How much a certain event is covered in the media, or whether you’ve seen instances of it recently in your life, can sway your estimate."