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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   6144 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for May 21, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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There's a psychological phenomenon where people overestimate the presence of their outgroup once their space is diversified. For example, when women are integrated into an all-male workplace, the men who were there before might feel that women now make up more than half of the workplace, when they only make up, like, 30%. Or when a social media platform stops banning far-right speech, its userbase might feel that the far-right has taken over the network, when they've merely gone from 2% of posts to 10% of posts. Is there a term for the cognitive bias that I'm describing?

I'm always really suspicious of supposed statistical bias like this. People use percentages as a smarter-sounding way to say "almost none," "not enough," "some," "a lot," "too many," and "almost all." I notice that I do this quite a bit and other people seem to grok what I'm trying to convey.

So in your example, when Joe Blow says "Dang man, our office is half female now!" If you were to respond "Do you mean to say that you believe that precisely 37 individuals out of the 74 total who work in our office are female?" Joe wouldn't say "Yes, that is indeed my hypothesis." He'd say something like "Shit man, hell if I know, all I'm saying is that ever since that new HR lady and those two chicks from accounting got hired it feels like I can't crack a single joke without people freaking out on me!" Joe's not making a statistical statement, he's using "half" to mean "too many."

For a search keyword, salience bias is probably the most common term. Minority salience itself isn't really treated as a term of art, but it is studied.

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