This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanta.

On any given day, you can find plenty of examples of people doing bad things.

And the pandemic, domestic violence is on the rise.

It's really this morning, an 80-year-old man,

beaten and robbed inside a lower East Side Bodega.

Which could lead to such things as them draining your bank account.

It's our two people have been arrested,

accused of human trafficking teenagers here in Central Florida.

It makes sense that our attention is drawn to these sorts of people.

From an evolutionary perspective, being alert to those who might cause us harm

can help to keep us safe.

Calling out these people also helps to reinforce the rules of our society.

But is it possible that we've become too focused on the wrong doers amongst us?

What if our focus on the bad makes it harder to see the many good people in our midst?

And what happens when these biases play out, not just at an individual level,

but are built into the structures of communities and nations?

In policy-making circles, you are regarded as highly intelligent and realistic,

if you say, listen, everybody's selfish, we have to treat the citizen,

the taxpayer, the employee and so on, as if he or she was entirely selfish.

Because otherwise maybe we're a chump or maybe we'll be taken advantage of and so on.

Over the past few weeks, we've looked at how we gauge other people's intentions,

why we underestimate our own likeability in interpersonal settings,

...