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| Bomb at the Boston Marathon |
What’s the difference? The Boston murderers were Muslims of Chechen origin, the other murderers were “regular” Americans. It’s easy to believe the different coverage is down to xenophobia or Islamo-phobia, and I don’t doubt there is plenty of that going on.
But there may be something deeper going on as well, which is about the way the brain processes information, something that is much harder to correct than xenophobia.
Apparently, new information coming to the brain is not absorbed directly. The brain makes sense of new information by referencing it to old or familiar information. Familiar information becomes a benchmark or a norm. New information is compared and contrasted to this familiar norm. Distinctive features of the new information are made sense of, are explained, by the attributes in which they most obviously differ from the norm.
For instance, in the corporate world I inhabit, the "norm" is that powerful people are white men. So when a woman exhibits a particular behaviour, say domineering or bullying behaviour, the mind finds an explanation for that behaviour, in her gender. The mind thinks "She's being domineering because she is a woman. Maybe she is over-compensating, trying to get ahead in a man's world." Equally, when a woman is self effacing, the mind thinks "She's being self-effacing because she is a woman, she is the product of generations of gender stereo-typing." The same behaviour observed in a white male might be explained by his biography or personality, but not by his gender.
Critically, this habit of the mind is involuntary. Research shows that it affects passionate liberals as much as bigots, even when the passionate liberals are fully aware of this unreasonable pattern of thought.
The reality is that it is almost impossible to know why what happened happened. The mind doesn't accept this vacuum, it fills it up with a plausible story. "Islamist plot", "right wing bigotry", "misunderstood immigrants", whatever - any story will do. The stories don't have to be true. They just need to protect us from accepting that God plays dice with the universe.
For instance, in the corporate world I inhabit, the "norm" is that powerful people are white men. So when a woman exhibits a particular behaviour, say domineering or bullying behaviour, the mind finds an explanation for that behaviour, in her gender. The mind thinks "She's being domineering because she is a woman. Maybe she is over-compensating, trying to get ahead in a man's world." Equally, when a woman is self effacing, the mind thinks "She's being self-effacing because she is a woman, she is the product of generations of gender stereo-typing." The same behaviour observed in a white male might be explained by his biography or personality, but not by his gender.Critically, this habit of the mind is involuntary. Research shows that it affects passionate liberals as much as bigots, even when the passionate liberals are fully aware of this unreasonable pattern of thought.
The same mental mechanism looks for an explanation for what happened, a cause, in the bombers' Chechen background - "they did what they did because of what happened in Chechnya". That is less stupid than jumping to the conclusion that the bombings were a part of an Islamist terrorist plot. That doesn't make it true.
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| God's dice |
2 comments:
Agree, Prithvi, readers familiar with Nassim Taleb and/ or Daniel Kahneman would understand the numerous biases - confirmation bias not least among them - that we automatically use to categorize and bucket information where familiar patterns do not fit the events.
Above is true with the Guardian's "News is bad for you" article you posted,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2013/apr/12/news-is-bad-rolf-dobelli
there was a riposte on the Guardian site as to why responsible citizens should consume news - same pattern of thinking that called the Boston Marathon bombing "terrorism".
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/apr/18/rolf-dobelli-ideas-news-dangerous
Exactly Shridhar. So much of what passes for analysis in the media is hogwash. Most analysis merely addresses our psychological need for a story. It steers us away from the really scary thought that, for the most part, even the great and the good don't really have a clue why the world functions the way it does.
People like Kahneman and (at a much lower level) Taleb don't operate that this level of analysing news. They get that most of this story-telling is bullshit. They also get the admitting to that much of what one observes is random does not mean switching off the mind and accepting the world is some kind of unknowable black box, either.
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