When reading the Blindspot pages and listening to the podcast, the concept of idea availability stuck out. We are surrounded every day with very similar people and circumstances because being comfortable is where humans, in general, feel the safest and accepted. Over time, different biases are formed because we like to take the easy way out and let society create us. Since we stay in our bubble, we are shown very similar actions and events every day. One part of the reading had us pick if option A or option B was more deadly. I chose B for the first and then A for the next two. The book predicted that I would do that and said it was because the media presents the A options, murder, and car accidents, more frequently than the B options, suicide, and abdominal cancer. If we go back to why people donate, people want to do the greatest good, but what tends to happen is they see different issues on their media outlets and feel a connection to donate. Whereas suicide awareness does not get the media attention, but at the end of the day is more deadly than murder, and we should be giving money to help the people struggling.
Critical Thinking
I agree with you that this human tendency to stay where we are comfortable can result in getting caught in an information vacuum. At Richmond, people always say that this campus creates a bubble that kind of separates us from what is really going on in the world. Furthermore, when we consider news intake especially in 2020 and now in 2021, people can watch certain channels and only receive one side of every story. In regards to the concept of idea availability, the ideas available in the news to inform important decisions about everyday life are filtered by the people writing the news day in and day out.
Yes! I think the “a” or “b” quiz is really interesting because I said the same; it’s all about the portrayal of incidents and what we are exposed to most often rather than factual statistics. A simple example of this in my own life would be how I perceive the entire world to have the same four seasons in the same months as I experience them because living in one place my entire life, it’s what I’m accustomed to and how I believe the world to function, where in reality the entire world doesn’t actually follow the same seasonal pattern I experience.
I think you did an awesome job of shedding light on the fact that our human nature often has so much to do with our tendency to want to stay comfortable. It reminds me of a quote I highlighted in a reading I did for my justice in civil society class. It talked about how segregation didn’t seem to be a problem at the time because it was “normal” and “didnt faze you”. I believe sometimes we need to be uncomfortable to make progress, and this is especially obvious when we think about biases and subconscious, automatic patterns of thoughts.