#perception bias

We like to believe our eyes are cameras and our brains are recording devices, faithfully capturing the world around us. This comforting idea suggests that what we perceive is simply what’s there — objective, unfiltered reality delivered straight to our consciousness. Yet this assumption about human perception is not just wrong — it’s misleading. The truth is far more fascinating. Perception…

(or basically, how my brain jumps into another topic only loosely related to the original ask)

Thank you @itsmaferart For the wonderful ask again. :)

Warning: Long post ahead

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Perception bias also serves another more...sinister purpose for Saitama. Psychological conditioning. There is potential evidence for deprivation of basic needs, conditioning for violence for protection and subliminal messages for suggestion, among other things.

Being deprived of all these needs is akin to mental torture. But so is facing all of the underlying issues at once via hypnotherapy and cognitive behavioural therapy if the patient is sufficiently dysfunctional in a societal setting like Saitama happens to be. Especially if the therapies are performed...poorly.

CBT has shown to be the most effective intervention for people exposed to adverse childhood experiences in the form of abuse or neglect Criticism of CBT sometimes focuses on implementations (such as the UK which may result initially in low quality therapy being offered by poorly trained practitioners. However, evidence supports the effectiveness of CBT for anxiety and depression. Evidence suggests that the addition of hypnotherapy as an adjunct to CBT improves treatment efficacy for a variety of clinical issues. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and its symptoms have been shown to improve due to implementation of hypnotherapy, in both long and short term. As research continues, hypnotherapy is being more openly considered as an effective intervention for those with PTSD.

In short, in order to heal mentally, Saitama may need to face mental torture because he has such strong willpower and such strong mental barriers shielding his vulnerabilities on a basic primal need. There only needs to be a sufficient trigger.

ONE sent Saitama home to restore his energy levels...because he's going to sorely need them for the upcoming confrontation.

Empty Void's ability to genjutsu people casually and cause parallel shifts in the reality and using these to abuse emotional dependencies is like a loaded Chekov's gun on Saitama's forehead. Because Saitama has been roleplaying to re-learn his emphatic skillset after he had suffered too much mental trauma.

That's why early Saitama did not even bat an eye when Beefcake killed his own brother but now he's empathizing with Hamukichi. That's what I call character progression.

Submitted by Geoff Anandappa, from Blackpool in Britain to laughlab.co.uk

Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson were going camping. They pitched their tent under the stars and went to sleep. Sometime in the middle of the night Holmes woke Watson up and said: “Watson, look up at the stars, and tell me what you see.” Watson replied: “I see millions and millions of stars.” Holmes said: “and what do you deduce from that?” Watson replied: “Well, if there are millions of stars, and if even a few of those have planets, it’s quite likely there are some planets like earth out there. And if there are a few planets like earth out there, there might also be life.” And Holmes said: “Watson, you idiot, it means that somebody stole our tent.”

My experience, being on secular forums and religious forums, is that I've seen many kind and concerned people from both camps.  I have been treated with respect from people in both camps.  I have seen people in both camps who are reactionary and vengeful. 

When a bad deed makes headlines, the first thing we want to know is whether the perpetrator did it “on purpose.” Intention matters in our moral judgments, as we intuitively realize and many studies confirm. Now studies suggest that this focus on the cause of an event can distort our understanding of the damage done—and knowing harm has been inflicted can even change the way we view the victims, ascribing them pain and consciousness when none might exist.

In a study published in July in Psychological Science, Princeton University psychologists Daniel Ames and Susan Fiske asked 80 study participants to read a vignette about a company CEO who had either accidentally or intentionally made a poor investment that resulted in lower pay for his employees. Those who thought the CEO had intentionally made the mistake estimated the harm done to his employees on a scale of 0 to 100 to be 39 percent larger than those who thought it was accidental.

In a follow-up experiment, 55 subjects read about a man who had either accidentally or intentionally diverted the flow of a river, causing a water shortage. Participants were then briefly shown an itemized list of the damages and were asked to estimate the total. Those who believed the diversion to be accidental estimated the damages accurately (on average, $2,753, as compared with the true total of $2,862), whereas those who thought the diversion had been done on purpose vastly overestimated the damages at $5,120. This psychological bias could have political implications: if governments systematically overestimate the damages done by intentional harms like terrorism, they might “leave fewer resources to combat other kinds of harms,” such as global warming, Ames says.

A different group of researchers at Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania explored how intentional and unintentional acts affect our perception of those injured. In their study, published in June in Psychological Science, subjects read stories about a hospital nurse who unplugged the food supply of a patient in a persistent vegetative state named Ann in order to make money. Others read a similar story about a nurse who took good care of Ann. When subsequently asked about Ann's mental capacities, the subjects who had read about her as a victim said she was much more able to feel pain and was more consciously aware than did subjects who read the other story. When participants read a similar pair of stories in which the nurse had either intentionally or unintentionally cut off Ann's food supply, those who thought the act was intentional ascribed more mental faculties to Ann than did the others. In another series of experiments, Ann was described not as a human patient in a persistent vegetative state but as either a robot or a corpse. Again, subjects thought the entities were more mentally aware if they were victimized.

Researchers say it may be possible to temporarily reduce racial biases.

In the popular imagination and in conventional discourse — especially in the context of highly charged news events such as the shooting of — prejudice is all about hatred and animosity.

Scientists agree there's little doubt that hate-filled racism is real, but a of social science research suggests that racial disparities and other biased outcomes in the criminal justice system, in medicine and in professional settings can be explained by and stereotypes.

Subtle biases are to police cadets being more likely to shoot unarmed black men than they are unarmed white men. (Some academics have also linked the to the Trayvon Martin case.)

Calvin Lai and Brian Nosek at the University of Virginia recently challenged scientists to come up with ways to ameliorate such biases. The idea, said Harvard University psychologist Mahzarin Banaji, one of the researchers, was to evaluate whether there were rapid-fire ways to disable stereotypes. Groups of scientists "raced" one another to see if their favorite techniques worked. All the scientists focused on reducing unconscious racial bias against blacks.

"Within five minutes, you have to do something to somebody's mind so that at the end of those five minutes you will now show a lower association of black with bad. And so this was run really like a competition to see which ones of them might work to reduce race bias and which ones don't," Banaji said.

The results  were as surprising for what they didn't find as for what they did. Teaching people about the injustice of discrimination or asking them to be empathetic toward others was ineffective. What worked, at least temporarily, Banaji said, was providing volunteers with "counterstereotypical" messages.

"People were shown images or words or phrases that in some way bucked the trend of what we end up seeing in our culture," she said. "So if black and bad have been repeatedly associated in our society, then in this intervention, the opposite association was made."

Banaji, who has been a in studying unconscious biases, said she has taken such results to heart and tried to find ways to expose herself to counterstereotypical messages, as a way to limit her own unconscious biases.