How Facebook investors fooled themselves

You're just always on our minds. And it leads us to temptation, Mark.

(Credit: James Martin/CNET)

When disasters happen, everyone wants an explanation.

This is partly so that it can't happen again and partly in order to find something or someone to blame.

I am relieved, therefore, that we finally have a culprit for the slight debacle that was the Facebook IPO.

No, it isn't Facebook's CFO, nor some rapacious banker, seated upon a velvet Bentley driver's seat. Instead, the cause of this tragedy was Availability Bias.

Should you not have heard of this phenomenon, or syndrome or complex it's the idea that if people find something important, they believe that everyone else must find it important too.

I am grateful to the availability of the Harvard Business Review for helping me understand its importance.

It seems that we, the weak-willed, are prone to making judgments based on what we can remember, what we think seems, well, obvious and familiar. We worry about plane crashes far more than we should, because they are always news, for example.

Obviously, this thinking doesn't always work out well for us. We waft around Facebook like flies around dung, in the assumption that we are participating in the world's most important progressive phenomenon, rather than a piti... [Read more]