DBTrek wrote: ↑Tue Apr 21, 2020 6:52 pmI think it's probably harder to form emotional biases if your day is very much rooted in concrete realities than in comfortable abstractions. Well fed, well protected, leisurely people have time to learn about racism, and classism, and sexism, and all the abstract -isms that become the replacement for actual struggles in life.
Everyone naturally struggling in life is dealing with just making it to the next day. So they don't have time to indulge in fantasy oppression, or vague notions of peoples represented by ideas and cultures clashing over time, and who owes what to whom for bygone wrongs.
Nope.
Their mentality is a lot more grounded in the present, the near-term, their direct circle of influence.
So can they have cognitive bias?
Probably, if cognitive bias is just a catch phrase for "mental shortcuts" we all use to get from A to F without stopping at B,C,D,E along the way.
But will they self-isolate in groupthink media bubbles and self radicalize?
I dunno about that.
I doubt it.
That sounds more like something citizens of a modern state would have time to do.
We are talking about two very different things.
Recency and novelty biases aren't abstract, like the isms you mentioned. They seem deeply rooted in survival, like the bias for false positives. The fact that they are heuristic short cuts is precisely what makes them supremely difficult to overcome.
You don't need leisure time to be blinkered by these cognitive (not emotional) failures.