While quickly detecting what is important and deserving of attentional resources is an important survival and learning mechanism, our predisposition to focus on the most prominent and emotionally striking details leads us to ignore potentially vital pieces of information. This bias can lead to suboptimal decisions, such as choosing unhealthy foods because their immediate sensory appeal (taste, smell, or appearance) is more salient than the long-term health consequences associated with them.

Salience bias and spending

The salience bias can hurt personal finances and investment decisions. Imagine you’re out shopping for a new top. You’ve seen similar items online and know you’ll only need to spend $50 to get what you want—and that’s all you’re willing to pay. Once you arrive at the shops, you see a 2-for-1 offer on the type of top you’re looking for, but each item costs $70. You, rightfully, think this is a good deal because you’re getting two items for $70 rather than just one for $50.

The special deal stands out as a great bargain, even though it actually leads you to spend more than you intended. Instead of focusing on what you need and plan to spend, your decision is influenced by the most salient information—the discount and the idea of getting more for your money. As a result, you end up spending $70 instead of $50, even though you only need one item.

The effect of negativity bias 

Salience bias is closely connected with negativity bias—our tendency to focus more on negative events than positive ones. Unfortunately, the media knows this and tends to put the most dramatic and shocking news items first in their bulletins, leaving the more uplifting items (if there are any) until the end. As a result, the negative events are more salient, and we notice them more. In turn, this can lead people to overestimate the likelihood of rare but memorable events, such as plane crashes, shark attacks, or violent crimes, leading to wrong risk assessments, unnecessary anxiety, or avoidance behaviors. 

Early in 2025, for example, there was significant debate online about whether plane crashes were becoming more frequent following a series of high-profile accidents and tragedies.¹⁰ In reality, the risk of dying in a plane crash remains extremely low compared to other forms of travel—1 in 100 million, to be precise. But because air disasters are vivid, emotional, and widely shared, they dominate our thinking far more than the data suggests they should. 

The reason it felt to many people like plane crashes were happening more often wasn’t because they actually were; it was just because they were more salient in people’s minds. With 24/7 news coverage, social media, and instant updates, every aviation incident was amplified and widely discussed.

The impacts of the salience bias at a systemic level are far-reaching and highly consequential. For example, businesses often run into planning errors and delays because of a failure to account for less salient aspects of their operations, such as administrative tasks or other ancillary steps that must be taken. High-visibility aspects of a project, like product development or marketing, tend to receive more attention. At the same time, logistical hurdles, compliance requirements, and maintenance are underestimated, leading to inefficiencies and cost overruns.

The salience bias can also be considered a crucial obstacle to environmental protection and climate change mitigation efforts. For many people, the benefits of a warm shower are immediate and perceptible, but the water and energy costs are much less so. As a result, the salience bias impedes us from focusing on the actions required to protect the environment, prioritizing our immediate comfort.¹⁴ Similarly, people are more likely to be concerned about extreme weather events, such as hurricanes or wildfires, because of their dramatic and destructive nature. However, they may overlook the slow but steady rise in global temperatures and sea levels because it feels less urgent despite being a far greater long-term threat.

In conflict zones, salience bias can lead to a disproportionate focus on immediate humanitarian relief, such as food aid, medical supplies, and emergency evacuations. This typically leaves long-term support underfunded or overlooked, including strengthening resilience, enhancing education systems, and building economic stability.¹¹ This imbalance in priorities presents a significant barrier to sustainable development by undermining long-term recovery. Governments and international organizations often prioritize highly visible crises that capture media attention, garnering more financial and political support to cover urgent needs. However, failing to invest in long-term strategies leaves affected communities vulnerable and perpetuates the cycle of instability.

On a societal level, salience bias also shapes public discourse and political priorities. Policies addressing pressing issues such as crime or the cost of living often receive disproportionate attention because their effects are salient in the lives of voters. Less salient but equally pressing issues, like cybersecurity threats or pension sustainability, struggle to gain traction. This focus can distort funding allocations, influence electoral decisions, and ultimately result in policies prioritizing short-term visibility over long-term impact.

The salience bias arises from a contrast (often unexpected) between items and their surroundings, such as a white sheep in a black sheep herd or a car alarm going off during a quiet day. It can result from several emotional or cognitive factors, not necessarily from some physical feature that someone can clearly see. The salience bias commonly develops due to a psychological process such as cognitive ease. It can occur over time as we become accustomed to prominent features in our daily lives, and it can also appear simply because our individual interests draw us toward specific aspects of the world.

Cognitive ease

The salience bias commonly manifests itself in the psychological process known as cognitive ease. Generally, humans avoid stressful and demanding cognitive strain, often making them vulnerable to many biases. This “laziness” and desire for cognitive ease can lead individuals to a world of irrationality where they make decisions according to the most salient elements. For instance, luminance, texture, contrast, and the scale of objects or ideas play a role in simplifying the mind’s decision-making process, which then leads to a salience bias.¹

Elements that develop over time

Some elements may become salient over time as we gain the habit of noticing them only at a particular moment. For example, we may pay no attention to the cars passing us by in the street until the very moment we wish to cross the street, in which case the cars suddenly become our primary focus. Another example would be if you find certain smells or sounds particularly salient because they were present in your childhood home growing up.

A matter of personal interest

What we do, and our personal interests can also affect what we find salient. Someone who works in fashion, for example, will be more likely to notice small fashion-related details than someone whose primary interest lies elsewhere. Additionally, an avid listener of music could find a tune or melody that they enjoy to be particularly salient if they heard it while walking down the street.

People make thousands of daily decisions, and attention-grabbing factors such as appearance, taste, sound, and even conversational relevance hinder the mind’s ability to make entirely rational calculations. Salient information often feels more relevant than it is, leading us to overlook deeper analysis or long-term consequences. Awareness of our biases to salient aspects of life can safeguard us against poor reasoning and costly mistakes in our personal and professional lives.

Studies have shown that this awareness is the key to overcoming the salience bias.² Indeed, whether people are trying to maintain a healthy diet or to manage their personal finances, being critically aware of how the salience bias manifests itself can enable them to have control over their decision-making and to improve their lives overwhelmingly.

The salience bias occurs when we base our decisions on vividness, novelty, emotional charge, or recency. When we are aware that the bias is at play, it can enable us to step back and properly evaluate the decision that is soon to be made. Though maintaining awareness of the bias is no ‘silver bullet’ that can ensure our choices are always well-informed, it can mitigate some of the more detrimental impacts of the bias.

Researchers have suggested that giving individuals real-time feedback concerning the choices they are about to make is one solution to avoiding the trap of salience bias. Additionally, at a systemic or political level, researchers have pointed to the delayed implementation of laws and policy as a potential way to avoid bias.

Real-time feedback

Studies have shown real-time feedback on a specific behavior can induce significant behavioral changes. When individuals are made aware of the consequences of their behavior as it occurs, they are more likely to adapt and make smarter choices. In the areas of resource consumption, having an awareness of salience bias can lead people to make environmentally conscious decisions. For example, a car or navigation app can display the cost and environmental impact of driving from the start of each trip, or the impact of current driving style on vehicle range, gasoline costs, or material strain. Another example, provided by Verena et al., illustrates that when consumers are made aware of their daily energy use from showering, they significantly reduce their consumption patterns.³

Beyond resource conservation, real-time feedback can prove effective wherever salience bias alters our decisions. Specifically, real-time feedback can mitigate the impact of salience bias on caloric intake. Studies have shown that displaying caloric information in restaurants reduces caloric intake by individuals. Thus, there is strong reason to believe that real-time feedback about caloric intake throughout the day would be a helpful side effect of salience bias.⁴

Delayed policy implementation

Policymakers can also consider salience bias in hopes of mitigating its negative effect at the societal level. Studies have shown that citizens know there are specific policies they should support because of how they will benefit society, yet they choose not to because other policies might be visibly beneficial. To counter this salience bias, researchers have found that people will support policies they know they should help when these policies are implemented in a visible rather than opaque fashion.

For example, when a "should" policy—like raising gas prices to reduce pollution—is scheduled for the distant future, people tend to focus on its abstract benefits (e.g., helping the environment). But when the same policy is set to take effect soon, they focus more on its immediate drawbacks (e.g., higher costs at the pump), which can lead to greater public opposition.⁵

American psychologists Shelley Taylor and Susan Fiske were among the first to popularize the term perceptual salience in 1975.⁶ In one of their experiments, they seated two people face-to-face having a conversation while observers sat in a circle around them. Afterward, the observers were asked to explain the causes of events during the conversation. Interestingly, people tended to attribute more influence to the individual whose face they could see more clearly. Taylor and Fiske concluded that what stands out visually—what is salient—shapes how people interpret events. This study was one of the earliest demonstrations of salience bias, helping explain why we often assign more power or responsibility to those who are more visible, such as politicians in the media or CEOs in boardrooms.

Prior to Taylor and Fiske’s work, Austrian psychologist Fritz Heider started investigating the salience bias while developing his attribution theory. Fritz’s theory explores how people interpret and assign causes to others’ behaviors. Heider proposed that individuals attribute behavior to internal factors (personality, intentions, or abilities) or external factors (situational influences, environmental constraints).¹² However, his research also highlighted that people are prone to salience bias when making these attributions.

Heider found that when observing others, we focus more on the actor (the person we are watching) rather than the context in which their behavior occurs.¹³ The person’s actions are more salient than the unseen environmental or situational influences affecting them. This can lead to fundamental attribution error, where we overemphasize personal traits and underestimate external circumstances when explaining someone else’s behavior.

Subsequent researchers have applied the salience bias (or perceptual salience) to numerous other aspects of life. Law professor, Deborah H. Schenk, for example, has applied research on the salience bias to the field of tax law. Schenk has found that policymakers can exploit the salience bias of a country’s population to increase taxes without specific high-earning individuals or corporations noticing.⁷ Other researchers have considered the effects of the salience bias in everything from our health and how we manage our finances to climate change.

Indeed, many researchers believe that if we can develop an awareness of this bias, many of our individual and societal problems could be solved.

Brands and companies understand the power of the salience bias and often make products and adverts more prominent or emotionally striking to grab customer attention. Take, for instance, the commercials during the Super Bowl. With eye-wateringly huge budgets and star-studded casts, these 30-second slots are just as important as the game itself. According to a survey by the Nielsen Group, 51% of viewers enjoyed the adverts more than the actual action on the field.²⁰

In promotional materials, marketers highlight the aspects of products they know will pique the interest of potential customers and carefully omit the features of products they want to hide (such as high maintenance costs or unsustainable materials). Aside from dazzling displays, attractive features, and celebrity endorsements, brands and retailers often engage in a practice referred to as artificial surprise pricing.

This psychological tactic exploits the salience bias by inflating regular prices to make discounts appear more attractive.¹⁸ The higher regular price serves as a reference point, making the sale price seem like a great deal, even if it reflects the product’s true, original value. This method relies on bottom-up attention, where the dramatic price drop captures consumer focus and boosts willingness to pay. Due to their potentially misleading nature, several U.S. states and the European Union have restricted these fake sales that artificially inflate regular prices.19 Despite this, the tactic remains widespread, particularly in department stores, Black Friday promotions, and car dealerships, where perceived savings drive impulsive purchasing behavior and manipulate customer decisions. However, over time, these tactics can erode customer trust and loyalty.

Salience bias is crucial in how we perceive and interact with AI systems. This bias can influence trust, risk perception, policy decisions, and even how AI functions. 

In 2023, ChatGPT-4 passed the bar exam, setting (no pun intended) a high bar for LLMs. Many started to ask whether AI could function like a lawyer, solely based on one example of the algorithm’s success. The model’s limitations were, temporarily at least, forgotten amidst the excitement of the achievement.¹⁵ The salience of AI milestones like this can lead to an overreliance on AI models, with people automatically trusting the machine’s response (like we would do with a human lawyer) despite the mistakes it can make.

Does salience lead to decreased trust?

On the other end of the spectrum, our attention to salient features of AI can lead to a lack of trust in these tools. When a self-driving car crashes, an AI-powered hiring system discriminates (such as Amazon’s AI hiring tool that was biased against women),¹⁶ or a facial recognition system misidentifies an innocent person, these incidents receive widespread media coverage, reinforcing the perception that AI is unreliable or dangerous. However, these failures are often statistical outliers, and the many uneventful but successful uses of AI go unnoticed by the general public.

So, what can be done to enhance trust in AI? Research actually suggests that increasing the salience bias in AI may work. Previous studies have indicated that many individuals are reluctant to trust algorithms and resist using AI in healthcare. One study, however, demonstrates that increasing awareness of bias in human decision-making—either generally or in relation to specific factors such as gender or age—can lead to greater acceptance of medical AI.¹⁷ Across six experiments, the researchers found that most people see discrimination and bias as mainly human problems—not something machines or AI naturally do (even though we know this is not true). So, when people are reminded that human decisions can be biased, they become more open to trusting AI in medical settings. In other words, highlighting human flaws makes AI seem like the better, fairer option in comparison.

Finally, large language machines such as ChatGPT use the salience bias to present important information in a way that will stand out more to the user. Responses are often presented in bullet point form with salient information highlighted for ease of retrieval.

While many individuals state to have high privacy concerns, prior research has shown that they often freely disclose private information when using information systems like the internet. This dichotomy has been coined the privacy paradox. Specifically, individuals may find certain aspects of a website, such as the design or the content, to be especially appealing. Due to the salience of these aspects, people may forget about their privacy concerns as they willingly give up their personal information to websites that suit their tastes.

A study by Flavius Kehr offers a solution to mitigate the extent of the salience bias in the field of personal privacy. Kehr suggests that making privacy a more salient feature at the moment of decision-making can remind customers of the risks of sharing sensitive personal data. This reminder could take the form of a message that pops up on an individual’s personal computer when he or she attempts to share private information. Once reminded, customers can then decide whether the risk of sharing their personal data is worth whatever salient aspect of the website originally caught their eyes.⁸ It is the hope of Kehr that internet users can thus use such an awareness to ensure that they are not giving away information that could put them at risk of identity fraud and other similar situations.

When purchasing a car, customers know they should consider such factors as fuel economy in their decision, yet they often forget about fuel economy when they see the attractive physical features that cars have to offer. The salience bias is once again at play in this scenario as the salient features of a car’s exterior sway the consumer to make a decision that does not consider whether or not the car is fuel efficient. As a result, the customer could make a financially inadvisable decision that would have been avoidable if they were aware of the salience bias at play.

Hunt Allcott and Nathan Wozny illustrate this bias in their study of how consumers undervalue future gasoline costs relative to purchase prices when they choose automobiles. Their research demonstrates that consumers are commonly indifferent to whether or not their car will lower their future gas costs, possibly because they are swayed by other salient aspects of the car. Thus, being aware of the salience bias can enable consumers to make well-informed decisions that may save them money down the road.⁹

What it is

The salience bias (also known as perceptual salience) occurs when we focus on items or information that are especially remarkable while casting aside those that lack prominence. Yet, people tend to overlook this difference because it often appears irrelevant from an objective point of view. The salience bias can result in errors in judgment and decision-making.

Why it happens

The salience bias arises from a contrast (often unexpected) between items and their surroundings, such as a white sheep in a herd of black sheep, or a person talking on the phone in a quiet elevator. It can be the result of a host of emotional or cognitive factors, not necessarily from some physical feature in the person’s field of view.

Example #1 - The privacy paradox

Many people are very worried about protecting their personal information when using the internet. However, if a salient aspect of a website catches an individual’s eye, he or she will happily give out personal information without considering the consequences. People must, thus, maintain awareness of the salience bias when using the internet.

Example #2 - Purchasing a new car

When shopping for a new car, consumers will know that they should consider fuel efficiency, yet they are drawn to attractive features of the car that provide no financial incentive. Many consumers ultimately purchase a car that has salient features despite the fact that this was not the financially prudent decision.

How to avoid it

The salience bias occurs when we base our decisions on factors that appear most salient. When we are aware that the bias is at play, it can enable us to step back and properly evaluate the decision that is soon to be made. Though maintaining awareness of the bias is no ‘silver bullet’ that can ensure our decisions are always well-informed, it can mitigate some of the more detrimental impacts of the bias.

Tackling Climate Change (1/2): Why Don’t We Act On Climate Issues?

This article addresses the cognitive barriers that we face as a society to tackling the issue of climate change. It considers the salience bias to be a primary factor that has limited our ability to take real action in hopes of protecting the environment.

This Is Your Brain On Money

This article considers how we treat money differently depending on its sources and intended use. The salience bias is featured prominently as the article discusses how our perception of money can dramatically change.