Upbringing Invulnerability Bias
This page describes a specific proposed bias from the Selective-Mindedness manuscript, not the general psychology of optimism bias.
Upbringing Invulnerability Bias is a proposed bias describing the belief that one's own upbringing, social environment, education, family structure, culture, or inherited framework did not shape one's thinking in the same way such forces shape others.
Definition
The bias occurs when a person recognizes conditioning in other groups but assumes exemption for themselves. It may appear as the belief that one's own childhood, culture, family, school, religion, class, nation, or political environment produced clear sight while other groups were conditioned.
Relation to selective-mindedness
Selective-mindedness depends partly on invisible boundaries. Upbringing Invulnerability Bias protects those boundaries by allowing a person to treat their own learned frame as neutral and other frames as biased.
Common forms
- "I turned out fine" as a defense of inherited systems;
- treating other communities as indoctrinated while treating one's own as merely educated;
- assuming personal independence from social pressure;
- recognizing propaganda only when it comes from opposing groups;
- treating first-learned beliefs as self-evident rather than inherited.
Limits
The concept does not claim that all upbringing is harmful or that all inherited beliefs are false. It identifies the asymmetry of seeing social conditioning in others while denying it in oneself.
See also
- First-Learned Bias
- Boundary-Defined Openness
- The Erosion of Childhood Adaptability
- Selective-Mindedness in Education
References
- Lehti, Andrew. Selective-Mindedness: An Introduction and the Illusion of Open-Mindedness. figshare, 2024.
- Rangel, U., and Keller, J. "Essentialism goes social: Belief in social determinism as a component of psychological essentialism." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 100(6), 1056–1078, 2011.
- Jost, J. T., Banaji, M. R., and Nosek, B. A. "A Decade of System Justification Theory." Political Psychology, 25(6), 881–919, 2004.
- Dweck, C. S., and Leggett, E. L. "A social-cognitive approach to motivation and personality." Psychological Review, 95(2), 256–273, 1988.