Understanding Biases within the Vampyre Community

I want to preface this by stating that it will be a psychological breakdown of biases within the Vampyre community. I am not a licensed psychologist this is purely an acknowledgment of what you may see within the VC. This is to be used as a tool when traversing controversies within the VC.

The Psychology behind Biases.

Biases affect the way you interpret, react, and spread information. These biases can come in different forms some shaped by your own ethics and opinions on a subject or can purely be influenced. Despite my feelings about bias being overall harmful to others it is what shapes our identity and unifies our belief system. But biases can be harmful.

Biases are developed to discard and approve random information that you want to hold as factual and/or useful. The way our brain forms biases at its core is from how and where we were raised, this could be a family influence or a country's influence. Let’s not forget your attachment to the information, how it makes you feel, and your familiarity with it.

The Core Types of Biases

Confirmation Bias It is the act of taking in specific information to confirm your current opinions and standing on a topic. In return, it causes you to ignore or not approve of other information since it does not correlate with the solidification of one’s belief.

In the VC, you may see this confirmation bias present for those trying to figure out if they are a vampyre or not. Someone may experience a set of symptoms and already thinks it’s vampyric so they are going to pick and choose information that's going to affirm this belief. This causes someone not to want to look into medical possibilities that cause these symptoms.

Affect Bias

To my knowledge is a more loosely used term when it comes to the different biases. This is the occurrence when someone allows their emotions to alter their perception of a topic. This affects your judgment by using your heart to feel instead of letting your brain think to protect you from harmful information.

This can be seen through the various generational traumas within the VC, there have been many. Let’s say, someone in the VC has been associated with a controversy proven or disproven to the public. This controversy has impacted the VC even into future generations. Now, the future generations were not there to experience it but know the topic of the controversy upsets them understandably they form a bias to dislike that person for whatever reason they found suitable. This is not just an occurrence in the VC but something that is in every community or even fandom. It is often associated with celebrities or influencers, which leads us to our next bias type.

Authority Bias

When you have built some form of liking or connection to someone who has some form of power or influence and they have gained your trust you immediately take their words as fact even if this person has no way of backing up what they have said you trust them. This is how social cult followings develop and is why you need to question everything as stated in one Luna_Sy’s blogs.

This is a very easy bias to fall into especially if you belong to a house that has an authority figure. This also stems down to new Vampyre community members doing research over the VC and comes across the more popular vamp influencers and contributors. They may use the Vampyre book as a rule book on how they should live their life. They will let these influencers' opinions alter their own so they can fit into the community. This is why I still have my fair share of disdain for some of the current people in power. They don’t realize how much their words shape the VC. But what also cannot be ignored are the people who blindly follow. (This is not going into the more manipulative factors that some of these figures may participate in)

The Illusory Truth Effect

This is the repetition of information constantly being shared and how often you see it. Due to how often you see it you begin to consider it as fact just because everyone else has shared and talked about it. Controversial information or incidents spread the most in this case.

This is a pretty big contributor to misinformation and biases within the Vampyre Community. Without delving into the controversies involving public figures, I will list off other examples.

• Blood consumption causes central heterochromia.

• A Christian group known as Vampyre Slayers being formed to take out VC members.

Reflection

Now that you have seen and understood the way the various biases work in the Vampyre community and even in your personal lives. Take time to reflect on your own biases and what influences them. Why have you formed such an opinion? Was this based on facts or was someone using their influence to alter your perception.