BW Legal World: India Gig Economy Policies Need More Nuance
India’s Gig Economy Policies Need More Nuance; Consistent Re-Evaluation is Key
BW Legal World, Sharang Shah, 17 December 2020
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In his international bestseller, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman details out his research with his long-term associate, Amos Tversky on mental systems, biases, and heuristics i.e. mental shortcuts built into our mind that allow us to solve problems and make judgments quickly and efficiently. In the book, he explains why our judgements may be skewed based on a number of factors including the availability heuristic, which is the tendency of our minds to draw the easiest available information of subject from our memory and apply that to situations thereafter. The availability heuristic makes our lives and decision making easier, but it comes at the cost of accurately judging events and leaves us with blind spots because of our rush to make decisions.
The availability heuristic can cloud our judgement as the mind jumps to the most memorable information, which could be because of the shock value or the omnipresence of the information. An illustration of this would be trending topics on Twitter, which are often aberrations that our minds assume are the norm because of the pervasiveness of the conversation. For example, we may be inclined to assume that the economy is doing terribly without looking at the aggregate data, if we’re surrounded or inundated by anecdotal evidence of people losing their work.
