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The Elitism Bias/In-Group Bias

The financial crisis has given us insight into a blindness bias that affects the elite.  Ask yourself: How furious were you to learn the details of the bail outs?  Unless you're reading this blog from a Goldman Sachs network, you were likely outraged.  How is it, then, that even progessives like Barack Obama were unable to anticipate the populist outrage? Cognitive psychology has the answer.  It's the in-group bias:In-group bias is the preferential treatment people give to those whom they perceive to be members of their own groups.Experiments in psychology have shown that group members will award one another higher pay-offs even when the "group" they share seems random and arbitrary, such as having the same birthday, having the same final digit in their U...continue to full post

Full post as published by Crime & Federalism on August 21, 2009 (boomark / email).