Description

The Human Brain: Cognitive Bias, Social Media, and Government Politics
Anthony Ambrosius Aurelius

“Researcher Yarrow Dunham has devised an examination which posits why people from different identifying groups cannot agree with eachother (e.g. conservative Republican stating that liberal Democratic news is misinformation etc.). Yarrow accomplished this by giving children either an orange or green shirt, selected at random by having the child spin an arm with a 50% chance to land upon either color. Yarrow then shows the children images of other children having playground issues which can be interpreted in multiple different ways. Yarrow has found that children are more likely to interpret a situation as negative if the child in the opposite colored shirt appears malign and with malintent (e.g. standing behind a child who is crying after no longer sitting on the swing). In contrast to this, children are more likely to interpret a situation as positive if the child in the same colored shirt appears to be malign and with malintent (e.g. viewing that same image as though the child behind the swing is coming to help the crying victim). No information is provided other than the child being inducted into either group as a member. The brain takes in this information and treats it as fact, but truly uses this data to construct evidence which supports a person’s already believed bias (e.g. multiple encounters with a specific ethnicity which were negative which leads to the assumption that all members of that same ethnicity must be the same).