The Representativeness Heuristic

The point of encountering something potentially even painful or distressing is not just to make you sensitive in anticipating what's going to happen in the future. So your brain now tries to assess the probability of another event like this happening. If I was to try and calculate the actual probability of an event, I would have to track all the variables in my environment. That's astronomically vast. Even a supercomputer cannot possibly do this. The real world has an indefinitely large set of variables interacting in an indefinitely large number of ways. We use shortcuts that try and help us cut through and zero in on the relevant data as we've said before.