I suppose I should start with a qualifier. I’m not well positioned to speak out on the recent acts of violence that have rocked our collective world. I’m not just referring to the attacks in Paris, although being a westerner, that’s what the majority of our press coverage has centered around. Violence, whether domestic or abroad, is sad. And that’s such an underwhelming description for it, sad. It’s wretched, depressing, inconsolable, despairing. Being the compassionate creatures we are, we’ve carried a heavy grief for the past 48 hours. As we should. And as we will the next time an act of mass violence hits the news wire.

Unqualified, uninformed, and physically removed from the acts as I may be, I have seen and read a lot opinions from my peers and network. These opinions have come from individuals equally unqualified, uniformed, and physically removed from the violence. There has been a lot of victim blaming. Nation shaming. Broad generalizations cast against a religiously identifiable group of mostly peaceful people. Calls for a response, retaliations, a decree that we will not stand for this. As sad as acts of violence make me, so does this.

I’m not going to deny that there is evil in this world. There is a lot of darkness that I hope I never have to face, that I hope my fellow humans will never have to face. We all have loved ones, brothers, sisters, friends, people that love us. I am not so naïve as to assume that bad things won’t happen to great people — despite how kind 99% of us are to one another.

I get sad reading these opinions of outrage because they serve to divide us, when we should be uniting. Often, the words I’m reading are not those of the individual who posted, but rather, of some demagogue who has yet again cacophonously politicized a high profile act of violence. There is a reason their words get coverage, and it doesn’t have to do with how well qualified said public figure is to speak on the issue.

The rhetoric, by definition, is polemic — it has to be — in the land grab that is the “public moral conscience.”

Being loud wins. Being radical wins. Being angry wins. And our populace is then left to decide which side of an issue they stand on. The problem is, this is a false dilemma, a fallacy of choice.

Again, I have to reiterate, I do not know enough about the acts of terror and the groups responsible for them to state an opinion, or declare a prescription for what we should do on a policy level. But what I do know, is that equally as threatening to the world as is Islamic extremism, is a naiveté about our own cognitive limitations.

We are deceived by the very super power that makes us humans remarkable — cognition. We can think, discern, assess, and conceptualize. And with this, comes an overconfidence in our ability to think, discern, assess and conceptualize.

Some really big problems stem from a lack of awareness about how we think. As Daniel Kahneman eloquently lays out in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, humans are systematically prone to making errors in judgment due to cognitive bias. Perhaps the most relevant to the current discourse is the availability heuristic and confirmation bias.

First the availability heuristic — it distorts our ability to evaluate a specific topic or event based upon how easy it is for us to recall immediate, tangential examples. This is particularly useful in understanding how we are affected by media coverage of events, and what we read in “the news.” More specifically, after seeing particularly vivid news stories about bombings or plane crashes, people will judge the likelihood of such an event being much greater than it actually is (because these events are so easily recalled).

Secondly, confirmation bias is the tendency to search for or interpret information in a way that confirms one’s existing beliefs. You can probably see how these two work in combination to powerfully shade our worldviews. If not, I’ll spell it out, using the recent attacks in Paris as an example.

First, there is already a misguided dogma held by some groups in the western world that “Muslims are bad.” The 9/11 attacks are no doubt part of the reason for this misguided sentiment, as normal, peaceful Islamic people are grouped by association with the extremists who caused so much destruction and suffering in the U.S 14 years ago. This is a classic in-group out-group bias effect in action. George Bush famously said it a decade ago, “you’re either with us, or against us.”

Carrying on with the example, we watch in horror on TV about how Islamic extremists systematically killed innocent people in Paris. We hear graphic accounts of people being gunned down, one by one. We read first hand narratives from individuals fortunate enough to survive the event, describing in terrible detail exactly how heinous, and in cold blood, the murders were. This type of vivid imagery is not something we will soon forget.

Unfortunately, what follows next is a strengthening of associations with Muslims and terror — queue the confirmation bias. There will be mindless acts of violence against immigrant Muslims in the communities in which they have raised their families. The Syrian refuge problem will only grow more divisive. We will be unable to stop future acts of terror, it’ll be said, unless we close down our borders, and start dropping bombs on “the enemy.” There will be a renewed call for government surveillance on its citizens’ communications. There will be a further militarization of police forces, in the name of public security. Congressional budgets will be passed to increase our spending on defense. Westerners will not feel safe.

Of course, this neglects the fact that you are much more likely to have your life torn apart and decimated by a fatal car accident on your way to work.

Cell phones and alcohol, probabilistically speaking, are a greater threat to your family’s safety. That doesn’t make for a fascinating news story though. It doesn’t grip us with fear. That’s just normal life for us, basic risks. Rather, what consumes the public conscience is some unknown, incalculable fear that our life can be shattered in a moment by some future act of evil.

I am in no way trying to diminish the severity and depravity of the events which just occurred. Understated, they are horrific. But I cannot stress enough how important it is to consider the effects of cognitive bias on our perception of these events — it affects how racist we become, how intolerant we become, and ultimately, how reactive we become.

The real tragedy here is a lot of what is good in the world will get shuffled out of the public conscience. It won’t get attention. The acts of love and kindness that occurred between strangers on the streets of Paris following the attacks, the types of stories that remind us how much more good there is than bad, that remind us that our world is a good world, that there are more altruists than not, these stories won’t be shared as much as the demagogues espousing whatever the hell sort of prescription they think we should follow. And sadly, the effect of this only further jades our perspective. So please, I implore you, be mindful of your bias. Violence doesn’t have to dominate our lives. We have power to change this.