Your Brain on Bias

Confirmation bias names our brain's tendency to reject anything that doesn't fit in with our current understanding, paradigm, belief system, or worldview. Its closely related to...

Complexity bias: our brain's tendency to prefer a simple lie to a complex truth.

Community bias: our brain's tendency to reject any idea that will endanger our status in communities we belong to -- to choose tribe over truth.

Comfort/Complacency bias: our brain's tendency to reject information that makes us uncomfortable, is inconvenient, or disrupts our complacency.

Confidence bias: our brain's tendency to believe people who display confidence, rendering us susceptible to those who come on strong even when they're wrong, including authoritarians and con artists.

Conspiracy bias: our brain's tendency to believe stories that exonerate us or portray us as innocent victims or unsung heroes while vilifying an out-group or individual, real or concocted.

Catastrophe/Normalcy bias: our brain's tendency to respond to dramatic catastrophes, but easily miss compounding slow erosions of normalcy.

Cash bias: our brain's tendency to accept information that might interfere with our way of making a living [or otherwise threaten our self-interest]...

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Religion can be a way of seeking to be clean and separated from the unclean… a temple, a sanctuary, a destination where good and innocent people isolate themselves from the dirty contagion of their unclean neighbors, so they can enjoy the sweet fellowship of their own kind…

But I don’t want to be better than anyone. I don’t want to win in any way that makes others lose… That means solidarity not only with victims, but also a painful solidarity with villains, for they are humans too, and the line between victim and villain doesn’t run neatly between humans, but jaggedly within each of us…

Traditional theologians use another word for God’s solidarity with us: incarnation, the belief that God incarnated (or embodied the Spirit of God) in human flesh, which means in solidarity with all humanity… When you embrace solidarity, you embrace humanity, including Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu, Sikh, humanist, and atheist humanity, and including the humanity of those Christians whose behavior consistently prompts you to ask if you can stand staying Christian for even one more second. By staying in solidarity with a flawed and failing religion, I stay in solidarity with all flawed and failing religions, and with our whole flawed and failing species.

-- Brian D. McLaren, Do I Stay Christian: A Guide for the Doubters, the Disappointed, and the Disillusioned (2022)