FanPost

Psychology explains why we freak out about injuries too much

Availability Heuristic

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic

AKA

The psychological fallacy that forces people to over estimate the likelihood of something happening because of prior or recent experience.

For example - if you see a news report that says someone was shot and killed walking the streets of Philly at night by a hooded man, you are psychologically bound to believe that shootings occur in Philly at night more often than they really do.

At a higher level, this fallacy occurs because we tend to only take notice of the unusually bad things that occur in society. That's because the news isn't going to report that someone walked home safely in Philly, because that happens every day by millions of people, and therefore, isn't news worthy.

Relating it Basketball

Basketball fans - specifically 76ers fans - believe that not recovering fully from an injury is more likely than it actually is, given our prior and recent experience of this: Elton Brand, Derrick Rose, and Andrew Bynum. This is applicabable to the NBA at large.

Because we rarely hear news about a player fully recovering from an injury - because that's expected - we only remember cases when players don't fully recover. In reality, statistics show that players more often than not fully recover from injuries.

This can also be applied to players than have very unusually positive results, like Adrian Peterson recovering so quickly from his injury. In reality, the mathematical average time of recovering from an injury is lower than AP's recovery time for an athlete, but because we don't hear about players with that injury recovering at a normal pace because it's, well, normal, we equate faster ACL recovery time with Adrian Peterson.

Science is fun.

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