Bias and Society

Developing Our Primitive Emotional Capacity to Respond to Our Globalized and

Technologically Advanced World
Peter DiDomenica
June 2016
In America and the world today our social fabric has suffered and weakened under a significant
polarization of political, ideological, and religious viewpoints resulting in increased tension and conflict
between groups based on racial, ethnic, political, ideological, and religious identification. A source of
this tension is attributable to our primitive emotional systems that are ill prepared to deal with the
extreme pace of social change involving technology, globalization, and communication. How we
respond emotionally to significant events, whether personal to the individual or on the world stage, is
significantly affected by a component of the emotional system called bias that serves to automatically
and unconsciously provide an immediate evaluation of the event as something harmful or helpful,
something to avoid or approach, or something to reject or embrace.
Bias, the unconscious prejudice in favor or against a person or group that serves our basic instinctual
drives, is a product of the most powerful and deepest type of learning - emotional learning. Powerful
because emotions are in furtherance of the most basic and primitive instincts of survival and
reproduction; deep because once an experience is tied to a strong emotional reaction the experience
and the bias associated with it can remain for a lifetime. Undoing the resulting bias takes extraordinary
effort to undo, if at all.
When emotional learning teaches you a certain experience is a threat to your basic instinctual drives,
anything resembling that experience for the rest of your life may trigger a negative emotional reaction
(usually fear). The experience does not have even have to be personal; it can learned through stories
from family members and friends or seen in the news or through cultural learning.
Because the purpose of the emotional reaction is to further your survival or reproductive fitness,
emotional responses to events need to be fast and cannot tolerate mistakes. Therefore, what will trigger
the emotional reaction is usually based on stereotypes and categorical thinking based on previous
similar events; simple rules that tend to broadly associate similar events as having similar characteristics
made in micro seconds. If some snakes are poisonous then all snakes are bad. If there is anything that
resembles a snake in the grass, like a crooked stick, then you will avoid it unconsciously. Our
evolutionary past has provided us a system with a high tolerance for errors when it comes to avoiding
anything that could threaten our survival. If only one crocked stick-like object in the grass out of a
thousand is actually a snake, our strategy is to avoid all thousand objects. To add to the power of these
emotional responses is the fact that they occur before conscious awareness due to the way the brain
processes stimuli. The emotional centers of the brain receive sensory signals prior to the same sensory
signal being processed by the conscious mind. Also, in a crisis situation, the default setting in the brain is
to shut down conscious deliberative and rational thinking and to rely upon programmed emotional
responses to get us through the crisis.
This is the nature of bias. We do it with snakes and we do it with people. We do it in many cases not
because we are racist or a bad person (although they are people who do this deliberately out of racism)
but because we are simply responding to our experiences in an unfiltered emotional manner. This bias

frames how we perceive people and events before our consciousness has even registered the person or
event. This bias can either be positive or negative. In dealing with people of other races our natural
inclination tends to be a negative bias. Research has shown the most Americans harbor negative
unconscious bias towards minority groups, particularly black and Hispanic males.
To undo this emotional learning cannot fully be taught in a classroom or through reading a book.
Because it is emotional and experiential learning it must be modified by through experiences which
trigger strong emotional reactions. The part of the brain that processes emotions, the limbic system, is
primitive and does not reason as our cortical thinking brain does; it responds to experience.
So if the vast majority of us tend to mistreat, or treat with indifference and reduced empathy, people of
different races and religions then the only way to truly stop this is to have positive experiences with
members of those other races and religions. Indifference can be just as harmful to the social fabric as
mistreatment because indifference means a reduction in empathy resulting in a lack of concern or
willingness to help those in need or those who are being abused. Our natural capacity for empathy is
generally limited to family and those we identify as being part of our in-group which can be as little as a
few dozen people. Lack of empathy towards a group and the perception a group is a threat provides
fertile ground for the growth of hatred, the state of mind necessary for us to purposefully seek to
destroy another person or group.
Unfortunately, high profile negative events in our culture involving race relations tend to polarize people
and drive people further apart compounding the problem. The mass media clearly contributes to this
polarization but in the final analysis they are only giving us what we want. Because of our own bias, each
of these high profile events drives us further into a zone of comfort aligning ourselves with people who
look and think like us and away from the very people we need to approach.
We live in a society infused with biases we all share that will, to some degree, always be with us. The
very social fabric of our society is deteriorating at an alarming pace as these biases lead to reduced
empathy and increased hatred. This social crisis is being fueled by a mass media that feeds these biases
by giving us what we want because we always want to know about what could hurt us. Media outlets
are well aware of our natural negativity bias, a tendency we all share to focus on negative events. In a
country of 350 million people and a world of seven billion people bad things will happen every day
somewhere and the media makes sure we know about these bad events on a continuous 24 hour basis
while neglecting almost all the good events. We should not ignore problems but we also need to have a
balanced perspective on the scope of the problems. Social media acts magnifying lens on what interests
us, and what interests us is usually negative events which fuel the fire of our biases. Politicians and
political parties will exploit biases to promote their agendas and political survival. Terrorist
organizations, special interests groups and marketers tend to do the same.
The terror group ISIS is a manifestation of the worst dangers of the globalized and technological 21st
century. Its extremist views of Islam and willingness to use extreme violence and intimidation to achieve
its political agenda is not new and has been around, at various times by various groups, for centuries. Its
ability to convert bias into hatred, create a dichotomous world view of us versus them, and demonize
and dehumanize their perceived enemies, is basic tactic of all societal groups facing an existential crisis.
The use of public beheadings and other forms of execution, enslavement, sexual abuse, and oppressive
social controls have likewise been around, at various times by various, groups, for centuries. And so too,
the conflict between West and Islam going back over nine centuries with periodic periods of violent
conflict followed by periods of relative peace. What is new is the ability of ISIS and other terror groups
Page 2 of 3

to reach a worldwide audience instantaneously and magnify its message, in terms of recruiting followers
and intimidating enemies, through technology and globalized nature of society. The merger of primitive
bias and hatred with the weapons and communication technology of the 21st century create a true
threat to global peace and stability.
We are in a perilous time at this moment, much like the world was a little over a century ago, just before
the start of World War I; one incident away from domino effect leading to global crisis. In Harvard
Professor Niall Fergusons book, The War of the Word: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the
West, the explanation offered for the extreme violence of the twentieth century does not include
individual people despite such notorious leaders such as Stalin, Hitler, and Mao Zedong. In the
bloodiest century in modern history, far more violent in relative as well as absolute terms than any
previous era, a century in which more than 160 million perished through organized violence, Ferguson
cites environmental and situational factors to explain the violence. Three things, states Ferguson,
seem to me necessary to explain the extreme violence of the twentieth century, and in particular why
so much of it happened at certain times, notably the early 1940s, and in certain places, specifically
Central and Eastern Europe, Manchuria, and Korea. These may be summarized as ethnic conflict,
economic volatility, and empires in decline.
We are now seeing marked increases in all of the volatility factors identified by Ferguson: The rise of ISIS
and ethno-religious conflicts in the Middle East, North Africa, East Africa, and South Asia; increased
racial tension in the U.S. and Europe and increased religious-ideological terrorism; the U.K. pullout of
the European Union and threatened economic crisis to the Union; waning strength of the U.S. as a world
leader; Russian aggression, such as the annexation of Crimea, in its attempts to rebuild its world stature;
nuclear threats by North Korea fueled by an despotic regime and its unstable leader; increased financial
volatility in world markets. Fear, nurtured by unethical leaders and organizations and magnified in effect
by the globalized media and internet, is feeding the fire of our primitive biases leading to indifference,
extreme polarization of attitudes and, ultimately, hatred. Hatred combined with an existential crisis and
identified enemy as the source of the crisis, can lead any social organization and its members, from a
street gang to a nation, to adopt acceptance of the merciless annihilation of the perceived enemy. It is a
disturbing aspect of human nature that each one of us, if sufficiently provoked, has the capacity to
switch off empathy, cancel the humanness of another, and accept, and possibly participate, in the
destruction of another person or group.
As a society we desperately need to develop a system of education and public awareness that
encourages people to control pulling the emotional trigger with each high profile event and to spend
time developing healthy relationships with others of different racial, ethnic, cultural, religious and socioeconomic backgrounds. We need to ensure our governments do not fuel the fires of nationalistic, racial,
ethnic, and religious bias and hatred both internally and externally. We need to nurture and expand our
empathetic capacity which, by our nature, is fragile and limited to those close to us and which can easily
be turned-off through bias or by manipulation by unethical leaders.
While we are in the midst of a revolution of globalization, technology, and communication, our primitive
minds are anchored in automatic stereotypical responses based on the world of our ancestors from eons
ago. This mismatch of our emotional capacity and maturity with the nature of society will only lead to
more conflict, aggression, pain, and suffering unless we act now to understand the nature of our
emotional lives and take steps to engage in emotional growth, on an individual and societal basis.

Page 3 of 3