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Posted By: Glenn

cmoking,

There are three things going on. Indeed the percentage of professional athletes that die in plane crashes is higher than the rate in the general population. The same is true of rock stars and most other celebrities and is due to the fact that they simply fly more frequently and therefore have more opportunities to perish in a plane crash than those of us who only fly a handful of times per year. However, what you're suggesting (the perception being out of proportion to reality) is true as well. The more memorable cases (in this case, professional athletes) tend to bias our subjective estimates of the probabilities. This is termed "the availability heuristic" and is the same phenomenon underlying people's mistaken impression that the number of homicide victims in our country is greater than the number of people who dying from falling in the shower or down the stairs at their home. Disproportionate media coverage of the events that are inherently more memorable adds further to the inaccuracies of people's subjective estimates.