We hear a lot these days (possibly the understatement of the year) about bias; in particular “implicit bias”. In a recent article about racism, though, a young black writer mentions some other kinds of bias:
First, our intuitions about whether trends have increased or decreased are shaped by what we can easily recall—news items, shocking events, personal experience, etc. Second, we are more sensitive to negative stimuli than we are to positive ones. These two bugs of human psychology—called the availability bias and the negativity bias, respectively—make us prone to doomsaying, inclined to mistake freak news events for trends, and blind to the slow march of progress.
“News items” tops the list for the first category. It should go without saying — I’ll say it anyway — that what becomes a “news item” and what doesn’t is a very selective process; the press has, perhaps, no greater power than deciding what it will ignore. (How many people know the name, for example, of Justine Damond?)
You can read this article — “The Racism Treadmill” — here. (And on a related note, see also this, about the ongoing mass slander against law enforcement.)