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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

This bias is easily explained: we expect (in the sense of "demand") people to treat each other decently. One can't be sapient without having this duty. Thus, people close to the victim of a killer or rapist quite reasonably believe there's no excuse for the crime to have occurred -- a specific person is responsible and needs to be punished and/or made to pay restitution, so feeling outrage toward him/her is the only appropriate response.

In contrast, car wrecks (excluding those caused deliberately or by gross dereliction) are sufficiently unforseeable (and the precautions that might have prevented them are sufficiently non-worthwhile) that there is nobody to blame: such things inevitably happen to a few. The same reasoning applies to lung cancer, if we credit the victim's own decision that smoking is enjoyable enough to be worth the risk to him/her. (If we don't, then it is self-inflicted.) In either case there is no reasonable target for outrage, except maybe "God".

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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

subsidiary to repugnancy bias and commission bias (bad things committed by an entity with apparent agency is more repugnant).

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