Musings on the Origin of Bias
I’d like to preface this by explaining that these are my personal musings and the result of casually trying to untangle and understand the psychological reasons for that hate and misdirected anger that I’ve been seeing in the world and in my personal life. I have not written this to be a scientifically accurate or scholarly source of information, but would love it if it served as a starting point for any discussion or research. Let me know if it does!
People are more likely to take notice of failure than they are of success. This concept has been brought up a lot on social media feeds recently, and is usually associated with the poster’s frustrations concerning their personal relationships. This is a significant social and philosophical concept however, and has even been discussed on popular television shows like Futurama, where a temporary character states that, “When you do things right, people won’t be sure you’ve done anything at all.” There have been many different circumstances throughout my life which have reminded me of this notion, but it only recently occurred to me to consider why this seems to be a truth that we live with.
My musings were prompted — as usual — by my recognizing that many individuals I know are quick to notice negative events and make false correlations between those events and whatever they’ve already vilified. This seems to happen because they haven’t noticed all of the times that those same circumstances have had positive outcomes. In example, the current racial and social tensions in the US have reminded the populace that racism has survived within the very structure of the nation and its many systems of governance and public forces. With this in mind, it can be seen that among those with racial prejudices, single negative or criminal actions involving people of color tend to ignite aggressive feelings toward entire groups of people. When logically, one widely publicized event cannot accurately reflect the behavior of an entire group. These people are drawn to take notice of and react to the one bad situation while completely disregarding the countless instances of positive events perpetrated by that group. It is a very prevalent logical fallacy.
A more easily overlooked example of this fallacy is in more mundane circumstances. There are people working to maintain power throughout a city and its connected neighborhoods at all times, and the people living in these areas receive electricity constantly and it is likely that not a single person making use of this power regularly takes notice of the work being done to maintain it, or to be grateful for the labor involved. The moment that the power goes out however, everyone will notice immediately and most people will likely be upset and start to blame the company in charge of distributing the energy. There is no evolutionary need to take notice of things that are going well.
This may play a role in mental health as well. Many people struggle to maintain a positive and hopeful view of the world or of themselves and instead focus primarily on negative events or negative aspects of their lives or personalities. It is possible that the way that our brains are hardwired to take notice of problems and things that may need to be fixed makes us more readily notice negativity rather than positive things.
I believe that this is an issue for humanity as a whole because there is little evolutionary benefit to spending time and energy focusing on things that are working properly. We notice when things go wrong because we need to fix them. There isn’t any need to work on things that are functioning correctly or doing their job. Mild weather allows for comfort and conditions to work on projects outside, which means that it isn’t interesting. When storm clouds approach, it means we have to cover things up, dress accordingly, and can’t do many of the things we had planned to do outside. Storms are interesting. We rarely think about the plumbing in our houses as long as water goes down the drain, but when the toilet overflows and shit-water spreads across our linoleum floor tiles, we have to think about our plumbing.
It seems to me that this relatively small, but biologically beneficial aspect of human psychology can lead us to developing harmful biases and generalized fallacious thinking when applied to large-scale concepts. Someone bought 50 dollars worth of candy and soda with their supplemental food benefits one time, so now the person behind them in line believes that the majority of people receiving food benefits is using them irresponsibly.
This is just my personal musing, but it seems possible that these two psychological traits are connected. I think some people hate all drug users because they would only notice their campfire when it started going out.
