I don’t know the label for it, but there is a cognitive bias that you see 20 imagined tigers for every real tiger when you are afraid. Fear makes you paranoid, you see more threats than are really there, you are biased towards seeing threats. This is of course adaptive behavior, the downside of running away from a non-existent tiger is much less than 1⁄20 of the upside from running away from a real tiger. (20 is a made up number, mentally replace it with “N>1” if you find it confusing).
I think a lot of conservative behavior suffers from the bias of seeing threats because of fear. People are afraid of Obama and Liberals and Immigrants and they see threats from all of them. They seem uncritical of the threat hypotheses, they have a bias from their fear.
I don’t know the label for it, but there is a cognitive bias that you see 20 imagined tigers for every real tiger when you are afraid. Fear makes you paranoid, you see more threats than are really there, you are biased towards seeing threats. This is of course adaptive behavior, the downside of running away from a non-existent tiger is much less than 1⁄20 of the upside from running away from a real tiger. (20 is a made up number, mentally replace it with “N>1” if you find it confusing).
I think a lot of conservative behavior suffers from the bias of seeing threats because of fear. People are afraid of Obama and Liberals and Immigrants and they see threats from all of them. They seem uncritical of the threat hypotheses, they have a bias from their fear.