Post by Lone Wanderer on Jan 30, 2018 7:56:28 GMT
Source: This Is Why You Trust Some Strangers and Not Others
Is your brain hardwired for bias?
Imagine you're sitting in a coffee shop, fiddling with your laptop, when nature calls. You decide to ask one of the people sitting near you to watch your computer while you use the bathroom. To your surprise, the person sitting to your left looks suspiciously like Emmy Award-winning nonagenarian Betty White, and the person on your right is a dead ringer for Al Capone. Whom do you ask to watch your property — the Golden Girl, or the gangster?
There is no right or wrong answer, but whether the choice seems obvious will likely depend on your prior experience, a new study suggests.
Researchers found that your ability to trust strangers is dependent on the stranger's resemblance to other people you know to be trustworthy or untrustworthy.
"We make decisions about a stranger's reputation without any direct or explicit information about them based on their similarity to others we've encountered, even when we're unaware of this resemblance," senior study author Elizabeth Phelps, a professor in New York University's Department of Psychology, said in a statement. "This shows our brains deploy a learning mechanism in which moral information encoded from past experiences guides future choices."
Is your brain hardwired for bias?
Imagine you're sitting in a coffee shop, fiddling with your laptop, when nature calls. You decide to ask one of the people sitting near you to watch your computer while you use the bathroom. To your surprise, the person sitting to your left looks suspiciously like Emmy Award-winning nonagenarian Betty White, and the person on your right is a dead ringer for Al Capone. Whom do you ask to watch your property — the Golden Girl, or the gangster?
There is no right or wrong answer, but whether the choice seems obvious will likely depend on your prior experience, a new study suggests.
Researchers found that your ability to trust strangers is dependent on the stranger's resemblance to other people you know to be trustworthy or untrustworthy.
"We make decisions about a stranger's reputation without any direct or explicit information about them based on their similarity to others we've encountered, even when we're unaware of this resemblance," senior study author Elizabeth Phelps, a professor in New York University's Department of Psychology, said in a statement. "This shows our brains deploy a learning mechanism in which moral information encoded from past experiences guides future choices."
. Not sure if that's tied to this too. 
. 
if that's tied to this too. 
It's nice they trusted me 
