The Salience Bias Warps Thinking

"They wanna teach that America is bad and they wanna indoctrinate our kids and I do not want that," Jan Throndson, a Rochester, Minnesota resident said about Critical Race Theory (CRT) at a July 2021 school board meeting.  "Now you're flying a pride flag? There's only one flag and it's the American flag," another resident said.  The story on KAAL.TV, the local ABC News affiliate, included angry, sometimes shouting citizens.  Board members tried to point out that CRT wasn’t even being discussed in the district, but that’s not what stuck out in the 3-minute segment.  

Whatever you think about CRT, news and social media coverage like this has ignited a firestorm in many local communities. Like most public issues, this one isn’t simple. Yet clear thinking about such issues is harder when images and emotions become salient - capturing the focus of our attention.

The salience bias occurs when prominent or conspicuous features of a person, issue or event dominate our attention, often blinding us to other relevant information and making logical thinking hard.  It’s not just in public affairs, of course.  An ad that shows a person delighted with a new drug or their new, flashy sports car is also the salience bias at work.

We are hard-wired by evolution to pay attention to what is salient – what’s novel or unexpected.  If Paleolithic man had not noticed a distinctive rustling in the forest, he many have missed – or become – dinner.  Salience provides other evolutionary benefits.  Our brains can easily become overwhelmed with sensory data, so learning to spot what’s distinctive helps us deal with information overload and store in memory only that which we really need for the future. 

Salience is not the enemy.  It’s the bias that salience may create that causes problems.  Seeing a social media post about how the COVID vaccine implants microchips, or watching coverage of a street protest that turned violent often turns our attention away from thoughtful consideration of what the COVID vaccine actually contains and the causes that led to the protest.

The salience bias fosters “cognitive ease” – the tendency to focus on what’s easy to comprehend and thus avoid the more cognitively complex.  Conspiracy theories advance in part because their wild charges get spread by those who don’t want to do the work to check whether facts support them.  Cognitive ease cuts short the search for causes of a problem.  A very salient story about a mass shooter leads to demands for more gun control without searching for the more complex set of causes, some of which cannot be addressed through gun laws.

The salience bias can foster stereotyped thinking.  The story of a rape committed by an illegal immigrant leads many to blame them for a rise in crime, even though evidence suggests they commit crimes at a lower rate than citizens.  

The salience bias can also distort statistical understanding of the dangers in our lives. A report of a COVID-vaccinated person ending up on a ventilator makes us miss the fact that over 95 percent of people hospitalized in the summer of 2021 for COVID were unvaccinated.  Similarly, the report of someone dying from a shark attack makes us miss the fact that we’re 1,000 times more likely to be struck by lightning.

The salience bias can also be abused by political candidates.  A well-planned rally with the candidate alone on a stage hurling one-liner attacks stands out in our visual and auditory field.  The audience cheers and too often suspends logical thought.

We can defend against the salience bias – if we acknowledge we’re prone to it.  We can learn to be wary of how sensory information, especially when it is emotionally packed, can warp our thinking.  Watch out, for example, for such phrases as “breaking news” and “bombshell report.”  They signal that what follows is deliberately designed to focus us on one salient piece of information, most likely without much depth.  In the print news business, the saying is that “if it bleeds, it leads.”  Reporters know how to grab our attention, which is why most news reports begin with a personal story.  That in itself is not bad, except when the rest of the piece lacks depth or we don’t bother to read past the opening.  

In social media, such as Facebook, the salience bias is enhanced by algorithms designed to flood your news feed with headlines and stories that grab your attention and play to your existing likes and biases.  We can defend against this if we avoid clicking “like” (which gets us more such items) and refuse to share what we have not fact-checked.

We can also control the salience bias by delaying decision making – refusing to act on what’s salient until we have studied an issue, person or event more carefully.  Still further, we can seek input from others who may not find something as salient was we do, asking their help in gathering more information.

Salience is inevitable.  The salience bias is not.

Photo Credit: en-volve.com