Jeff Desjardins offers this remarkable visualization of 188 cognitive biases that have been documented so far. This graphic adds value by organizing them in categories and subcategories. Click on the image to explore it.

We are witnessing a major turn to cognitive science. It has affected economics, which used to presume rational economic decision-makers who maximized their utility, but which now increasingly understands economic actors as deeply influenced by biases. It also affects a “civics class” view of democracy in which citizens can form opinions about policies and vote accordingly. It supports the alternative view, already championed by Schumpeter and Lippmann nearly a century ago, that people are highly imperfect reasoners when they turn to politics.

I believe all of this must be taken very seriously. However …

1. We must be careful how to generalize about these findings. Because of our cognitive limitations, we tend to over-generalize specific observations. As a result, we may give too much credence to specific findings, or take a heterogeneous batch of findings as evidence of an oversimplified view of human cognition as a whole. It would be ironic if we over-stated human cognitive limitations because of our Belief Bias or Ambiguity Bias or some other documented limitation. See this piece for that same point.
2. We should bear moral differences in mind. The Implicit Bias Test shows that most White Americans exhibit negative biases toward Black people. The same test also reveals many other biases. Racist biases could therefore be understood as mere examples of our hard-wired need to use heuristics to interpret the booming, buzzing confusion of the world that we experience. But negative racial stereotypes are worse than most other biases, at least in a country where having Black skin has always been dangerous. Moral distinctions cannot arise from the science of cognition; we must bring them separately to bear.
3. We can design processes and contexts to manage cognitive biases. My favorite example (which I think I took from someone else): we did not evolve to be able to measure time as precisely as modern life requires. So we wear time-measuring devices on our bodies and hang them all over our walls. Likewise, we did not evolve to understand–or even to care about–news from foreign places. So we invented journalism and found ways to pay for it. The lesson is to steer between (a) naive optimism about humans’ mental capacities and (b) deterministic pessimism about human limitations. Our constraints are built in, but what we do about them is up to us.

See also: don’t let the behavioral revolution make you fatalistic, evolution, game theory, and the morality of modern human beings, don’t confuse bias and judgment, popular theories of political psychology, challenged by data, qualms about Behavioral Economics, Joseph Schumpeter and the 2016 election.

About 1 million US citizens, mostly retirees, currently reside in Mexico. According to one study, 92 percent of them don’t have their papers fully in order to live there. Even if they are fully documented, they hold ambiguous civil and political rights. The Constitution of Mexico, after stating that everyone shall have the basic privileges and immunities guaranteed by Chapter 1, goes on to say, “However, The Federal Executive shall have the exclusive power to compel any foreigner whose remaining he may deem inexpedient to abandon the national territory immediately and without the necessity of previous legal action. Foreigners may not in any way participate in the political affairs of the country” (Article 33).

You might think that all human beings have human or natural rights to live anywhere. Then Mexico and the United States are both illegitimately blocking some migration. (This is a radical view with radical implications.) Or you might say that all people must have free speech and due process rights, regardless of their citizenship. Then Mexico’s Article 33 seems problematic.

My intuition is different. I favor equal rights for people who reside within the United States even if they don’t have legal citizenship. I recognize that in some cases, their entry was an illegal act, but I am inclined to weigh that very lightly, if at all. I am mainly concerned about how they may be exploited or dominated within this country if their rights are not guaranteed. I am particularly uncompromising about their civil and political rights. Meanwhile, I would object to US retirees entering Mexico against Mexican law and would not complain if they were deported. And while I’m not sure I’m a fan of Article 33, I can see plausible reasons for Mexico to ban resident aliens from political engagement.

In other words, I am sympathetic to people who migrate from the Global South to the US, but not vice-versa. I myself would enjoy living for a time in several foreign countries, but I would not claim a right to do so unless it was legal under those countries’ laws. And I would tend to respect any prohibitions they imposed on my political action within their borders. I might make exceptions if the local government had forfeited its legitimacy and I wanted to help the opposition, but even then, I would be inclined to defer to citizens of the country in question to be the leaders.

This is an inconsistent position if it’s all about human rights, abstractly. Why not treat migration the same way regardless of its direction? I think my view puts human rights in the context of justice among nations. Mexico is a lot less wealthy than the United States and has excellent reasons to worry about its national sovereignty. It is because I assume that the international order is unjust in this kind of way that I am prone to favor rights for migrants to the US, regardless of their legal status. I then end up favoring rights for wealthy migrants from wealthy countries only because it’s best not to discriminate within the class of immigrants. The paradigm case for me is a migrant from a nation that has been disadvantaged by global politics.

Two questions: 1) Is my stance justified? And 2) Does it help to explain the political disagreement about immigration? Many Americans don’t see the US as unfairly advantaged at the global level; some even think that we’ve been unfairly disadvantaged as a nation, as Donald Trump often claims. I wonder whether that premise helps explain why they are so unsympathetic to migrants.