A Dark Legacy of 9/11

9/11 left a large mark on not only America, but the world. The fear behind 9/11 is still ongoing, and has affected us in both negative and positive ways. Part of that fear has led many to jump to conclusions about how to prevent such a thing from happening again.

One of those conclusions—an erroneous one—is that if the terrorists were Muslim, then we must fear all Muslims. This expands to fear of all people from Middle Eastern descent, as well as religion in general.

However, religious extremists do not speak for all people with religious beliefs. Just as a small group of people originating from one race do not speak for all people descending of that race. Similarly, one group of Christians (such as the Westboro Baptist Church) doesn’t speak for all Christians.

The reason we tend to jump to these conclusions is because we’re used to making such shortcuts in our thinking, which are called “cognitive biases.” Cognitive biases are tendencies we all have to help us think on the fly with our emotions rather than engaging the “big machinery” of our logical thinking.

Psychologists have identified dozens of biases that the human brain uses, but two of them that are relevant to this situation especially are “the group attribution error” and “outgroup homogeneity bias.”

The group attribution error is a biased belief that the actions or traits of individual group members speak for all people within that group or belief, despite what available information suggests to be otherwise.

The outgroup homogeneity bias is the idea that other members of one’s own group are more varied than members of other beliefs or groups.

The way to avoid being subject to these biases is to be aware of your own thinking, and to double check your thinking before accepting it as fact or valid opinion. This is called metacognition.

Metacognition, as defined by American developmental psychologist John Flavell (1979), means to think about your thinking, to have knowledge about your cognition and to be able to have control of it. An example may be that you are engaging in metacognition by noting that you should fact check A and B again before accepting A as fact.

So, for instance, many Americans are afraid of accepting Syrian refugees into the country because they’re afraid they will be letting terrorists in. Rather than being overcome by fears presented to us by our brain’s shortcut system, we can stop and apply metacognition.

Considering that the brain’s biases tend to be emotionally based, when we feel fear about something (such as other people who we think are not “like” us) we can take that emotion as a reminder to stop, and think about how we are thinking.

As Eric Posner writes in Slate magazine, “given the infinitesimal number of Syrian refugees to be let into the country out of the millions of people who would qualify, it would be crazy for a professional terrorist to try to enter this country by pretending to be a refugee. It would be easier to obtain a tourist visa.”

It’s easy to understand why 9/11 generated fear in the minds of Americans. But to base our opinions on this fear puts us into a dark place. It divides us from others, and keeps us from fulfilling our legacy of accepting those people who are “tired, poor, huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”