- Alan Petrillo No, selection bias has to do with the selection of individuals for a study.
- Jay Ashworth Ok. I'll go look.
- Alan Petrillo No, not really. Confirmation bias is related, certainly, as people will tend to gravitate toward news stories which confirm their already held biases.
- Alan Petrillo Where you really see confirmational bias is in people's choice of outrage porn. Someone who is certain that guns are the root of all evil will tend to engage in recreational outrage by reposting all kinds of dreck about how guns are the root of all evil.
Violence And The Availability Illusion.
I've
been saying for years that the idea the United States is a horribly
violent place is entirely a creation of our wonderful news media and
their "if it bleeds it leads" policy. This idea persists even though it
is completely unsupported by real data. Now I have a name for this
problem: The availability illusion.
The
availability illusion is defined as "Forming an opinion based on data
foremost in one's mind." Our news media, with the way they cover
violent crime, keep it foremost in our minds by finding stories of
sensational violent crime, and then beating those stories for all
they're worth. We see them all day every day in all of our news media.
Because of this it's no wonder that many people think the United States
is a very dangerous place.
The truth, however,
is exactly the opposite. As I have stated, and proven, time and time
again, our homicide rate has been declining continuously since the early
1990's, and our overall violent crime rate has been declining more or
less continuously since 1993. This is difficult for people to accept,
even when they've had their noses rubbed in actual statistics from
reputable reporting agencies, because the availability illusion is so
strong.
The key, in our case in the United
States, is our relatively large population. At 317 Million, we have the
third largest population in the world, behind only China and India.
Because of this, even though we have among the lowest violent crime and
homicide rates in the world, we still produce more than enough incidents
to fill the news media's relatively limited space for coverage.
Because of this relative overabundance, the media have the luxury of
being able to pick the most spectacular, most salacious, and most
heinous crimes they can find in order to feed their consumers' fears,
and sell more papers.
Even if we had Japan's
historic low homicide rate of 0.8/100,000/year, since we have such a
large population, we would still be producing enough violent crime to
slake the media's thirst for blood. And the availability illusion would
keep rolling along.
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