I downvoted because if you're going to try to practice rationality or hone your understanding of your own biases, emotionally charged current events are a very bad domain to play around in. It's like trying to learn the basics of Newtonian physics by studying Theo Jansen's sculptures. There's a giant tangle of stupid-inducing factors in this case, and a well chosen toy problem would be able to address the same subject without being likely to inadvertently flip those switches.
I disagree. Emotionally charged events tend to be both important, AND the ones in which rationality is most trampled. All who aspire to be less wrong in a meaningful way will benefit from sorting out the things that bias reasoning about emotionally charged current events.
After the terrorist attacks at Charlie Hebdo, conspiracy theories quickly arose about who was behind the attacks.
People who are critical to the west easily swallow such theories while pro-vest people just as easily find them ridiculous.
I guess we can agree that the most rational response would be to enter a state of aporia until sufficient evidence is at hand.
Yet very few people do so. People are guided by their previous understanding of the world, when judging new information. It sounds like a fine Bayesian approach for getting through life, but for real scientific knowledge, we can't rely on *prior* reasonings (even though these might involve Bayesian reasoning). Real science works by investigating evidence.
So, how do we characterise the human tendency to jump to conclusions that have simply been supplied by their sense of normativity. Is their a previously described bias that covers this case?