[Blog]Questioning Our Own Perceptions — Toward a Society Aware of Its Cognitive Biases —

2026-09-27

1. The Final Question in Overcoming Cognitive Traps

Throughout Part X, we have examined the cognitive biases that arise when human beings try to understand others. Chapter 54 explored social categorization and outgroup homogeneity; Chapter 55 examined ingroup bias and collective self-enhancement; Chapter 56 addressed asymmetrical attribution and confirmation bias; Chapter 57 considered threat perception and scapegoating; and Chapter 58 examined how these cognitive processes have contributed to exclusion throughout history.

Having learned about these problems, we may become better at identifying prejudice and faulty judgments in others. However, recognizing someone else's cognitive biases is not the same as being able to correct our own.

Someone who criticizes generalizations about foreign nationals may nevertheless treat everyone who expresses concern about immigration as belonging to a single group. Similarly, someone who emphasizes the importance of maintaining social order may assume that those who question institutional practices are indifferent to public order.

Cognitive bias is not a problem confined to people who hold particular positions. It can affect those who are convinced that they are free from prejudice, as well as those who believe their judgments are based entirely on common sense.

The concluding question of Part X is therefore not simply who is prejudiced. It is how we can design a society in which people can question their own judgments and correct them when necessary.

2. People Find It Difficult to Recognize Their Own Cognitive Biases

Human beings may recognize biases in other people's judgments while regarding their own conclusions as rational and grounded in facts. In psychology, this tendency is known as the bias blind spot.

Consider someone who argues that repeated reporting of crimes committed by foreign nationals can create prejudice against foreigners as a whole. That argument may have a reasonable basis worth examining. However, if the same person interprets every criticism of immigration policy as evidence of hostility toward foreigners, another cognitive bias may be operating.

Conversely, someone concerned about the social costs of immigration may believe that their position is based on statistics and local conditions. Yet they may selectively collect information supporting their concerns while disregarding research that points toward different conclusions.

The important question is not which position is inherently more biased. It is whether we recognize that our own judgments, like those of others, are influenced by information selection, personal experiences, emotions, and group membership.

Questioning our own perceptions does not mean abandoning our opinions. It means acknowledging that errors can enter the process through which opinions are formed and examining the evidence on which they rest.

3. Examining the Conviction That “I Am Looking at the Facts”

People often believe that their own judgments are based on facts, while those who disagree with them are influenced by emotions or prejudice.

However, even when people observe the same facts, they may reach different interpretations depending on which aspects they emphasize, what comparisons they make, and which causes they consider relevant.

Suppose the number of foreign residents increases in a particular community. Some people may interpret this change as an increase in the workforce supporting the local economy. Others may focus on growing demand for housing, education, and other public services. Some may welcome greater international diversity, while others may be concerned about differences in language or everyday customs.

These observations are not necessarily mutually exclusive. An increase in foreign residents may contribute to the local economy while simultaneously creating new challenges for the provision of public services.

Nevertheless, if people mistake the particular aspect they emphasize for the whole of reality, those who point to other aspects may appear to misunderstand the facts.

The Balanced Coexistence Model emphasizes distinguishing facts from interpretations. What has actually been established? What are we inferring from those facts? What value judgments are included in our evaluations?

Separating these three elements can transform discussions between people with different opinions. Instead of questioning one another's character or motives, they can examine the evidence and the policy choices under consideration.

4. Changing Our Minds Is Not a Defeat

People tend to maintain opinions they have already expressed. When those opinions are closely connected to their social identities or the values of groups to which they belong, changing their minds may feel like rejecting themselves or betraying their communities.

Yet social conditions change. New statistics become available, previously overlooked problems emerge, and the results of implemented policies may differ from initial expectations.

Someone who initially focused on the positive economic effects of immigration may discover challenges involving housing or educational capacity and reconsider how immigration policies should be designed. Conversely, someone who was deeply concerned about the costs of immigration may learn more about foreign residents' employment, tax contributions, and participation in social insurance, leading them to revise their earlier assumptions.

In either case, updating a judgment in response to new information is not a defeat for one's former self.

Rather, the ability to explain the grounds for a judgment and revise its conclusions when those grounds change is essential to continuous learning.

The Balanced Coexistence Model does not envision a society that knows the correct answers from the beginning. It envisions a society capable of recognizing and correcting its mistakes.

5. Opposing Views Can Help Us Examine Our Own Perceptions

When confronted with opinions different from our own, we may search for weaknesses in the opposing argument and attempt to defend our existing position. This tendency can be particularly strong in immigration policy, where public order, economic interests, human rights, cultural differences, and community life involve multiple and sometimes competing values.

However, opposing views may contain facts we have overlooked or reveal problems that become visible from a different position.

For someone who supports expanding immigration, concerns about the educational and housing challenges facing local governments may provide valuable information about the conditions necessary for successful implementation. For someone who emphasizes restricting immigration, evidence concerning labor shortages and the contributions of foreign residents may help clarify the consequences of different policy choices.

Of course, respecting opposing views does not mean accepting that every claim is equally accurate. False information, unsupported generalizations, and statements denying individual human dignity must be examined against evidence and applicable legal principles.

What matters is that we do not reject verifiable facts simply because they appear within an argument with which we disagree.

We should distinguish which parts of an opposing argument concern established facts, which involve predictions about the future, and which express value judgments. By doing so, disagreement can become an opportunity to examine our own perceptions.

6. Empathy Matters, but Empathy Alone Is Not Enough

Understanding the lives and experiences of foreign residents and imagining their perspectives can help reduce prejudice. However, empathy alone does not guarantee fair judgment.

People often find it easier to empathize with those who have experiences similar to their own or whose personal stories they know. They may find it more difficult to extend the same degree of empathy to unfamiliar groups, people whose faces and names they do not know, or those whose values differ from their own.

For example, learning about a foreign resident at risk of losing their residence status may help us understand that person's anxiety and practical difficulties. However, the employer, the immigration official responsible for the decision, other foreign residents who expect the rules to be applied fairly, and members of the local community may also have distinct circumstances and legitimate concerns.

Empathizing with one person's experience is an important starting point for understanding their situation. But designing an entire institution around that experience alone may obscure the circumstances of others.

Within the Balanced Coexistence Model, empathy does not mean identifying exclusively with one group. It means understanding the experiences of people in different positions and considering how their respective rights, responsibilities, and constraints should be balanced within institutions.

Empathy helps us understand individuals, evidence helps us examine circumstances, and institutions help us reconcile competing interests. All three are necessary.

7. Foreign Residents Also Experience Cognitive Biases

If discussions of prejudice against foreigners focus exclusively on the perceptions of Japanese people or the receiving society, foreign residents may be portrayed as passive subjects of other people's judgments.

Yet foreign residents also understand Japanese society and Japanese people through the influence of their own experiences and group identities.

An unpleasant experience at an administrative office may lead someone to believe that Japanese public administration is generally indifferent to foreigners. Unfair treatment at work may create the impression that Japanese companies do not treat foreign employees fairly. Conversely, an encounter with one particularly kind Japanese person may lead someone to conclude that Japanese people are universally considerate.

These perceptions are grounded in personal experience and may therefore feel entirely real to the individuals concerned. Nevertheless, a single experience does not necessarily represent society as a whole.

Of course, it would be inappropriate to dismiss actual discrimination or mistreatment by attributing a victim's experience to cognitive bias. Where concrete harm has occurred, the facts must be established and appropriate remedies provided.

At the same time, both Japanese and foreign residents benefit from distinguishing individual experiences from judgments about entire groups and revising their perceptions when necessary.

Social integration cannot be achieved solely through foreign residents learning about Japanese society, nor solely through Japanese society learning about foreigners. It is a reciprocal process in which both sides seek to understand one another and examine their own assumptions.

8. Recognizing Cognitive Bias Does Not Mean Avoiding Responsibility

Emphasizing cognitive bias may create the misunderstanding that criticism of unlawful conduct by foreign nationals, or of concrete problems arising within receiving communities, should be avoided in order to prevent prejudice.

However, the Balanced Coexistence Model does not use cognitive bias as a reason to exempt individuals from responsibility for their actions.

When unlawful conduct occurs, it must be addressed according to applicable law and evidence. When employers fail to pay wages or impose unlawful working conditions, their responsibilities must be examined. When administrative authorities make inappropriate decisions, the decision-making process must be reviewed and necessary corrections made.

The problem is not the attribution of responsibility itself. It is extending responsibility for specific conduct to people who were not involved, solely because they share the same nationality or group membership.

Similarly, the fact that a foreign resident has suffered unfair treatment does not justify concluding that all Japanese people or all administrative institutions are discriminatory.

Distinguishing individual, organizational, and institutional responsibility makes it possible to develop policies that address the actual causes of problems.

Questioning our own perceptions does not mean abandoning judgment. Rather, it means removing unnecessary generalizations so that responsibility can be established more accurately on the basis of facts.

9. Public Debate Should Not Become a Trial of Other People's Motives

Discussions about immigration policy sometimes focus on the presumed motives of people holding different opinions.

Some assume that those advocating immigration restrictions must be motivated by hostility toward foreigners. Others assume that those advocating expanded immigration must be indifferent to public safety or the social costs of immigration.

However, a person's policy position alone rarely provides sufficient grounds for determining their internal motivations.

Even among people who support the same policy, concerns may differ considerably. Some may prioritize economic conditions, while others emphasize community life, administrative capacity, human rights, or international relations. The reasons for opposing a policy may be equally diverse.

Of course, when someone makes an explicitly discriminatory statement or presents false information, the content of that statement can be examined and criticized. But if we assign motives to others based on their group membership or policy position before examining what they actually say, public discussion moves further away from factual analysis.

The Balanced Coexistence Model emphasizes not the elimination of disagreement, but the examination of competing arguments in ways that can be verified.

What problem is being identified? What evidence supports the argument? What effects and unintended consequences might the proposed policy produce? Who will bear its costs and responsibilities?

Sharing these questions provides a more constructive foundation for policy discussion than speculating about the motives of those who disagree with us.

10. Creating an Information Environment That Allows Perceptions to Be Corrected

Even when individuals try to recognize their cognitive biases, their efforts may be limited if the information they encounter every day is consistently one-sided.

Modern societies distribute enormous amounts of information through search engines, news services, videos, and social media, often according to individual interests. These systems make information more accessible, but they can also concentrate attention on material that reinforces existing beliefs.

Someone interested in crimes committed by foreign nationals may repeatedly encounter similar incidents and begin to feel that such crimes are widespread throughout society. Conversely, someone who primarily encounters information about the contributions of foreign residents may overlook actual tensions within communities or problems in institutional arrangements.

In neither case is the information necessarily false. The problem is that repeatedly observing only one part of reality can produce a distorted understanding of the whole.

What is needed is not merely a greater quantity of information. People also need to understand how information was collected, what comparisons were made, and under what conditions the reported findings apply.

Statistics should clearly identify their target populations, denominators, reporting periods, and classification criteria. Reports of individual incidents should distinguish established facts from generalizations about entire groups. Evaluations of public policies should disclose not only favorable outcomes but also unexpected results and unintended consequences.

Rather than leaving the correction of cognitive biases entirely to individual effort, society should create an information environment in which evidence can be examined and verified.

11. Public Administration Must Be Capable of Questioning Its Own Decisions

Cognitive biases can influence organizational decisions as well as individual judgments.

Administrative agencies operate according to laws and regulations. Nevertheless, interpreting legal provisions, evaluating facts, exercising discretion, and establishing priorities all involve human judgment.

Decision-making criteria developed through past experience may become unsuitable as social conditions change. Heightened concern about a particular category of immigration applications may also lead officials to treat similar applications alike without adequately examining their individual circumstances.

Public administration therefore requires mechanisms for reviewing its own decisions.

Decision-making criteria and their purposes should be clearly defined, and the grounds for individual decisions should be recorded. Agencies should examine whether comparable cases receive different treatment without reasonable justification. When an appeal or judicial decision reveals an error, the response should extend beyond correcting the individual case to reviewing administrative practices so that similar errors do not recur.

Opinions and complaints from people who use administrative services should also be treated as potential sources of information about inadequate explanations or operational problems, rather than dismissed as expressions of dissatisfaction.

Within the Balanced Coexistence Model, explainability is not merely a mechanism through which administrative agencies justify their decisions. It is a means of making the grounds for those decisions available for external examination and correction when necessary.

Administrative trustworthiness does not depend exclusively on the absence of mistakes. It also depends on the ability to detect, explain, and correct mistakes when they occur.

12. Can RegTech Complement Human Cognition?

The Balanced Coexistence Model identifies RegTech and the digitalization of administrative procedures as potential means of improving institutional transparency and predictability.

Properly organizing data, clarifying decision-making criteria, and enabling comparisons between similar cases may help supplement judgments that would otherwise depend heavily on individual memory and experience.

For example, analyzing requests for additional documents, processing times, and reasons for approving or rejecting residence applications, while protecting personal information, may help identify inconsistencies or deficiencies in administrative explanations.

However, technology-based decisions are not necessarily fairer than human decisions.

If historical decisions contain biases, systems trained on those decisions may reproduce the same patterns. Moreover, decisions about what to measure, how to classify information, and what should count as a problem inevitably involve human value judgments.

RegTech must therefore provide more than automated processing. It should also enable decision-making grounds to be traced, classification criteria to be examined, and errors to be corrected.

Particularly where decisions have serious consequences for residence status or essential aspects of everyday life, human review of system-generated results, appropriate consideration of individual circumstances, and meaningful opportunities to challenge adverse decisions are essential.

Technology cannot automatically eliminate human cognitive bias. It can, however, provide information that helps people examine and correct their own judgments.

13. Turning Cognitive Correction into Social Learning

Recognizing one's own cognitive biases and correcting one's judgments are important forms of individual learning. However, if those experiences remain confined to individuals, society's institutions and established practices may remain unchanged.

Chapter 53 argued that transforming experience into social learning requires a continuous cycle of reflection, correction, and redesign. The same principle applies to cognitive bias.

For example, when communication problems arise between foreign employees and their colleagues, the cause should not automatically be attributed to cultural differences. The organization should also examine how work instructions are communicated, whether explanations are available in appropriate languages, how training is conducted, and how managers respond. It can then improve its procedures and assess whether similar problems recur.

Likewise, when tensions arise between foreign residents and local communities, responses to specific conduct should be distinguished from broader issues such as insufficient communication of community rules or inadequate consultation services. Necessary improvements should be implemented and their effectiveness reviewed over time.

Administrative agencies can also accumulate information from applicants' complaints, screening errors, judicial decisions, and statistical changes, using that information to improve institutional practices.

By connecting changes in individual perceptions to organizational improvements and institutional redesign, society can reduce the likelihood of repeating the same mistakes.

The important question when a problem occurs is not simply whose character or which group's supposed characteristics caused it. It is how the same problem can be prevented or addressed more effectively in the future.

14. Trust Does Not Mean Believing in Others Unconditionally

Having examined cognitive bias, we arrive at an important question. If our own perceptions are not always accurate, and other people's judgments may also be biased, on what basis can society develop trust?

Within the Balanced Coexistence Model, trust does not mean believing that others will always act correctly. Nor does it require maintaining uniformly positive perceptions of foreign residents, Japanese people, administrative institutions, or businesses.

Trust means recognizing that problems may arise while having reasonable grounds to expect that the institutions and relationships responsible for addressing them will function.

When foreign residents use administrative procedures, they should be able to understand the decision-making criteria, prepare the necessary documents, receive explanations when problems arise, and seek correction when mistakes occur. When local residents encounter problems affecting community life, they should know where to seek assistance and be able to expect appropriate responses grounded in facts. When businesses employ foreign nationals, they should understand the rules and responsibilities they must observe and have a reasonable degree of predictability concerning institutional changes.

As such experiences accumulate, members of society can come to rely on institutions and relationships without having to trust one another unconditionally.

Understanding leads to predictability, predictability to reliability, and reliability to trust. The ability to question our own perceptions is an essential condition for sustaining this progression.

15. Moving Beyond “Them” and “Us”

Throughout Part X, we have examined how the categories people use to understand a complex society can generate cognitive biases.

The category “foreigner” may be necessary in legal systems, statistics, and policy design. However, it cannot serve as a universal explanation for an individual's character or behavior.

Similarly, the category “Japanese” does not mean that every member of Japanese society shares the same experiences, values, or interests.

We belong to multiple groups within society. Nationality, occupation, community, family, school, and workplace create different relationships and responsibilities in different situations.

There are circumstances in which the distinction between foreign nationals and Japanese citizens is legally or practically relevant. In other circumstances, what matters more is that people are residents of the same community, colleagues in the same workplace, or taxpayers and social insurance contributors supporting the same institutions.

The Balanced Coexistence Model does not seek to eliminate differences between groups. It envisions a society that recognizes relevant differences without turning them into unjustified generalizations about individual worth or responsibility.

Achieving such a society requires more than asking others to reconsider their perceptions. We must also subject our own judgments to continuous examination.

We should be able to explain why we believe our conclusions are justified, consider the implications of evidence that challenges them, and revise our judgments when errors become apparent. These abilities are necessary not only for individuals, but also for administrative agencies, businesses, and local communities.

Cognitive bias cannot be eliminated entirely. However, we can recognize that it exists and establish mechanisms to identify and correct it.

The conclusion of Part X is not that all distrust of others must disappear or that every disagreement must be resolved into a single opinion. Rather, it is that society should recognize the limitations of human cognition, share verifiable facts, examine its judgments, and correct problems when they arise.

Part XI brings together the institutional, technological, experiential, and cognitive dimensions examined throughout this book to consider how trust becomes embedded in society. Trust cannot be created by command. It develops through repeated experiences in which members of society discover that they can rely on institutions and on one another.