Familiarity Bias

Description.

Components.

Further reading.

• Narrow/local/near bias (rename to 'narrow'?): we focus on (ie, assign higher priority qv to) what we're familiar with: our own relatives and friends, ethnic identity (cf war in Africa), the current time (cf future generations; cf. time-scope qv). Rename in line with -scope PFs?
• 'bias' may be inflammatory/pejorative: consider 'focus' or 'scope' (which would align with other -scopes, although they are aspects of problem rather than thinking). 'emphasis' or 'focus'?
• Is familiarity-bias responsible for our willingness to allow other species to go extinct despite how many humans there are? If the last surviving lion was threatening to attack a human (one of 10 billion), which one should die?
• This trap is especially relevant to problems with large thing-scope qv and/or time-scope qv.
• The earth is flat, or so people thought for a long while because they were too close to it to see the subtle curve of the horizon (pic of horizon and pic from space?). Equivalent thing happens with time: if change is too gradual, we won't notice it and we'll assume that it isn't changing (GW).
• Sub-optimisation is a subset of this (when defined to mean fully optimising a subset of the whole system).
• Smoking (link from time-scope): the next cigarette won't kill you. Even if lung cancer does eventually get you, most smokers probably won't get it for several decades. Ditto obesity. cf tiny-impacts qv, time-scope qv
• Maybe familiarity-bias needs to be split into now-bias (short-term thinking). Examples of now-bias:
  
  • going into debt to get stuff now; governments running deficits to buy votes for next election regardless of mounting interest repayments in future.
  • not closing lids on jam containers because it saves time now, even though contents dries out and ants get in
  • not turning off lights seems to have no adverse consequences because the electricity bill usually doesn't arrive until a month later
• Lack of community feeling, and especially the global community, causes us to focus more on self and our immediate circle. Link to priorities qv, insignificance qv. Money allows us to get what we want without human interaction, resulting in reduced community awareness. cf money itself isn't a priority qv.
• cf emotion (which contributes to this) qv, optimisation qv utility function (utilitarianism), culture qv, confirmation-bias qv, priorities qv.
• time-scope and familiarity-bias: see Barb\Peter's\past-now-futures for representation of narrow temporal window
• "I'll just keep happily driving down this road at night with the headlights off. If I end up driving off a cliff, at least I won't have been worrying." (cf demoralising qv). Reduce cynicism!
• Rationalise with time-scope qv; a lot of that is about the thinking-trap rather than the problem-factor.
• Dia: fam-bias-time-scope.svg:A narrow window (short time-scope) lets us conclude that the problem isn't significant. A long window (long time-scope) shows us that it could be catastrophic. Will the climate be okay this year? Yes. ...for the rest of my life? ...probably. ...for our descendants? ...maybe not. (link to rising uncertainty with time.)

Quote: Out of sight, out of mind. More compassion for a sick pet than for the tens of thousands of people killed in African conflicts every year (because Africa is remote from the experience of most Westerners).

Related: probability qv and risk-factor-misjudgement qv: narrow focus on time means we might not perceive variability indicating probability. Example: deciding whether GW is real or not on the basis of a cold summer. Taking a longer view, we’d see the probability distribution (ie, no B&W).

Related: reductionism. Both focus on solving parts of the overall problem, rather than looking at the whole system in terms of relationships and competing priorities. Align or combine??