Salience
The Basic Idea
“What makes you stand out?”
Interviewers, career counsellors, and admissions committees love this question. How many times have you been told you need to develop your personal brand, asked what makes you unique, and showered with tips on how to set yourself apart from the next candidate? As repetitive [and perhaps annoying] as these phrases can be, they are rooted in a psychological concept known as salience, something that humans – including your next boss – are consistently drawn towards.
Simply put, salience is the quality of something standing out from its neighbors or surroundings. Salience can arise from a multitude of external and internal factors. For instance, your eyes would be drawn to a black sheep amongst a herd of white sheep, which is a sensory contrast.
When making difficult decisions, one solution may stand out based on the fact that we have seen it before – this happens because our brain prefers the choice that is the least stressful to digest, known as cognitive ease. For instance, if you recently saw a news channel talking about a plane crash, you will be more cautious about planes, rather than grappling with the statistics of how unlikely a plane crash actually is.
Thus, vivid and easily imagined causes of death (for example, tornadoes) often receive inflated estimates of probability, and less-vivid causes (for example, asthma attacks) receive low estimates, even if they occur with a far greater frequency (here, by a factor of twenty)
– Richard H. Thaler
About the Author
Oorja Majgaonkar
Oorja is a former content creator with a passion for behavioral science. She previously created content for The Decision Lab, and her insights continue to be valuable to our readers.
