Whac-A-Mole Bias

A cognitive bias where a person focuses obsessively on the negative actions, flaws, or problems associated with minority groups or marginalized individuals, while systematically ignoring external factors, structural conditions, and the equivalent or worse actions of majority groups or society as a whole. Like the arcade game, the biased person's attention darts from one negative example to another, "whacking" each perceived problem with criticism—but never looking at the broader context or the behavior of the dominant group. A commentator who endlessly highlights crimes committed by immigrants while ignoring crimes committed by native-born citizens exhibits Whac-A-Mole Bias. A pundit who blames poverty on poor people's choices while ignoring systemic economic forces exhibits the same pattern. The bias lies in selective attention: problems affecting or caused by marginalized groups are hypervisible, while identical or worse problems among dominant groups are invisible. The result is a systematically distorted picture of social reality that reinforces existing hierarchies.

Example: "He could recite every statistic about crime in minority neighborhoods but had no idea about white-collar crime rates or political corruption—Whac-A-Mole Bias, whacking every visible mole while the whole lawn is infested."

Whac-A-Mole Bias by Dumu The Void March 17, 2026