Bias Is Built Into Our Brains. But There’s Still Hope.

We sort social groups into categories by our very nature. GETTY

Human beings are simplifiers. We are cognitive misers, exerting the least amount of mental effort that we can in making decisions. We rely on heuristics, or mental shortcuts, to take the fastest route from A to B. And we are categorizers.

The tendency to conceive of the world around us in categories is a strategy that is often adaptive, but has at least one unfortunate…