{"id":87224,"date":"2017-02-20T12:00:03","date_gmt":"2017-02-20T12:00:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=87224"},"modified":"2017-02-20T11:52:23","modified_gmt":"2017-02-20T11:52:23","slug":"the-cognitive-bias-president-trump-understands-better-than-you","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2017\/02\/the-cognitive-bias-president-trump-understands-better-than-you\/","title":{"rendered":"The Cognitive Bias President Trump Understands Better Than You"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Getty Images<\/p><\/div>\n

18 Feb 2017 – <\/em>Americans born in the United States are more murderous than undocumented immigrants. Fighting words, I know. But why? After all, that\u2019s just what the numbers<\/a> say.<\/p>\n

Still, be honest: you wouldn\u2019t linger over a story with that headline. It\u2019s \u201cdog bites man.\u201d It\u2019s the norm. And norms aren\u2019t news. Instead, you\u2019ll see two dozen<\/a> reporters flock to a single burning trash can during an Inauguration protest. The aberrant occurrence is the story you\u2019ll read and the picture you\u2019ll see. It\u2019s news because it\u2019s new.<\/p>\n

The problem here is not just that this singling out creates a distorted, fish-eye lens version of what\u2019s really happening. It\u2019s that the human psyche is predisposed to take an aberration\u2014what linguist George Lakoff has called the \u201csalient exemplar\u201d\u2014and conflate it with the norm. This cognitive bias itself isn\u2019t new. But in a media environment driven by clicks, where politicians can bypass journalistic filters entirely to deliver themselves straight to citizens, it\u2019s newly exploitable.<\/p>\n

You know who else isn\u2019t as likely to commit murders in the US as native-born citizens? Refugees. Or immigrants from the seven countries singled out in President Trump\u2019s shot-down travel ban. Or for that matter, immigrants at all. According to numerous studies<\/a>, increased immigration correlates with lower violent crime rates in a community. Yet next week, Trump is promising a revised travel ban in the name of safety.<\/p>\n

In the past, the president has also promised to publish a weekly list of crimes<\/a> committed by undocumented immigrants. What he hasn\u2019t promised to publish is a list of crimes committed by Americans. That\u2019s not news. But his list is likely to create the false impression that undocumented immigrants are especially prone to commit violent crimes\u2014an impression in which the human brain is complicit.<\/p>\n

Taking Advantage of Bias<\/strong><\/p>\n

Lakoff, a University of California, Berkeley linguist and well-known Democratic activist, cites Ronald Reagan\u2019s \u201cwelfare queen\u201d as the signature \u201csalient exemplar.\u201d Reagan\u2019s straw woman\u2014a minority mother who uses her government money on fancy bling rather than on food for her family\u2014became an effective rhetorical bludgeon to curb public assistance programs even though the vast majority of recipients didn\u2019t abuse the system in that way. The image became iconic, even though it was the exception rather than the rule.<\/p>\n

Psychologists call this bias the \u201cavailability heuristic,\u201d an effect Trump has sought to exploit since the launch of his presidential campaign, when he referred to undocumented Mexican immigrants as rapists.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt basically works the way memory works: you judge the frequency, the probability, of something based on how easily you can bring it to mind,\u201d says Northeastern University psychologist John Coley. \u201cCreating a vivid, salient image like that is a great way to make it memorable.\u201d<\/p>\n

This is the same bias that makes you fear swimming in the ocean lest you get attacked by a shark, despite shark attacks being far less common than, say, death by coconut. When something is memorable, it tends to be the thing you think of first, and then it has an outsize influence on your understanding of the world. After the movie Jaws<\/em> came out, a generation of people was afraid to swim in the sea\u2014not because shark attacks were more likely but because all those movie viewers could more readily imagine them. (Disclosure<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

Psychologists stress that your brain has to work this way, to a certain extent\u2014otherwise you\u2019d have a very hard time differentiating and prioritizing the avalanche of inputs you receive throughout your life. \u201cIt\u2019s not a cognitive malfunction,\u201d says Coley. \u201cBut it can be purposefully exploited.\u201d When Trump uses a salient exemplar that will lodge in your brain, he\u2019s manipulating your brain\u2019s natural way of sorting information.<\/p>\n

But if you can\u2019t totally eliminate your brain\u2019s predisposition, you can at least work against the potential for bias it creates by understanding that it exists. Journalists in particular need to be mindful because exploiters of this bias, such as the president, are taking advantage not just of the way the human brain works but the way journalism works. The daily news at its worst becomes a catalog of salacious salient exemplars that only serve to distort the reality journalism in its most ideal version aspires to reflect. \u201cWe haven\u2019t done as good a job of actually explaining how things function at a higher level, the success stories,\u201d says Ann Marie Lipinski, curator of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard. This failing aided Trump during the campaign, Lipinski says. By focusing on negative stories, the news helped to paint a picture of an America in need of \u201cbeing made great again.\u201d<\/p>\n

Recently, Trump told an audience<\/a> of senior military commanders at CENTCOM that the \u201cvery, very dishonest media\u201d didn\u2019t report on terrorism. The implication was that journalists bury important news about terrorism because of some alternate agenda. Later that day, Trump spokesman Sean Spicer released a list of terrorist acts the president felt that journalists didn\u2019t spend enough time covering. Journalists pounced: Hey, we reported<\/a> on ALL OF THOSE! We won Pulitzers<\/a> for our reporting! Here are a bazillion front page headlines<\/a> proving it!<\/p>\n

In doing so, journalists took the bait<\/a>. The stories about their stories fed the narrative that terrorism is everywhere (it\u2019s not). Instead, reporters need to get smarter about covering the non-aberrant, to show that commonplace does not equal mundane. It may not be rare, but it\u2019s reality.<\/p>\n

______________________________________<\/p>\n

<\/a>Emily Dreyfuss is <\/em>WIRED’s News and Opinion editor. She edits <\/em>WIRED Security, Opinion, and morning news. <\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 wired.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The aberrant occurrence is the story you\u2019ll read and the picture you\u2019ll see. It\u2019s news because it\u2019s new. The problem here is not just that this singling out creates a distorted version of what\u2019s really happening. It\u2019s that the human psyche is predisposed to take an aberration and conflate it with the norm. This cognitive bias itself isn\u2019t new. But in a media environment driven by clicks, where politicians can bypass journalistic filters entirely to deliver themselves straight to citizens, it\u2019s newly exploitable. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[62],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-87224","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87224","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=87224"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87224\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=87224"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=87224"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=87224"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}