People know only the few most famous examples of any field, so a handful come to stand for the whole.
TV Tropes named it for the way fiction draws on the same few references, such as Beethoven's Fifth for classical music or Einstein for genius, because those are the ones an audience will recognise. The site warns its own contributors to beware of their small reference pools before deciding that something was never common.
In practice
- A board discussing competitors names the same two famous firms at every meeting and misses the small rival taking its customers.
- Asked to name a philosopher, most people say Socrates; asked for a second, most hesitate.
- Possible explanations
- One explanation is the availability heuristic: the examples that come to mind are the ones met most often. Another is the skew of fame itself, since attention in every field concentrates on a few names, as in the superstar effect.
- In its favour
- Consistent with the availability heuristic and with the extreme concentration of attention seen in fame and sales data.
- Against it
- A folk observation rather than a measured finding, and a small pool is often a reasonable economy: most people need only a few examples from fields outside their own.
- Standing
- Compare the availability heuristic and Rosen's superstar effect.
- Subject
- Psychology & Behavior
- Essay
- A century and a half of measuring the mind