There Are Only Human Stories

How cognitive bias, not malice, quietly strips people of their humanity — and what it costs the ones left behind

When John Wesley Fountain, my former New York Times colleague, joined me for the third episode of my podcast three years ago, he said something that stuck with me. When I asked him what advice he would have for journalists, he said “the most important thing is to remember that there are no urban stories, no suburban stories, no rural stories, no black stories, white stories. They’re only human stories.”

Fountain’s sentiment is something all but the most elitist among us would agree with. Yet, when we look at the coverage itself — which stories get the resources, the front page, the book deal, the second season — a pattern emerges long before you ever open a balance sheet. In book publishing, online news, television, and podcasts, whose story gets told as fully human — and whose gets reduced to a type — tracks with an uncomfortable precision to race, geography, and class. The behavior follows the clicks, and the clicks follow the bias. This is an issue I struggle with on a personal level. I am not immune, but I have become increasingly convinced that dehumanization has become an umbrella, our cognitive biases are the mechanism, and our self-delusion is the cloak we drape across the things about ourselves that we do not want to see.

Just like human stories come with different faces, dynamics and elements, the cognitive biases that affect our consumption — and therefore the incentives of those who tell stories — come in many forms, but, collectively, that create a caste for how we see the world, one that becomes self-reinforcing.

A tree in a park. It's hard to know what happened here.

Earlier this year, I had the opportunity to hear Jena-Lisa Jones, a victim of Jeffrey Epstein as a teenager, talk to an auditorium full of people. It was an emotional experience coming face-to-face with a woman who, as a 14-year-old high school student, first encountered Epstein in Palm Beach, Florida through his network of local teenagers he used to recruit so he could abuse girls. In cooking, a reduction is the process of simmering a liquid to decrease its volume. Jones and many other victims were reduced to singularly naïve young women who fell into his web. The truth is, as the Epstein Files have shown us, is that there was nothing singularly unique about these women. It was the predator who was unique in his gift of manipulation. Yet it is easier to believe that there is something deeply fragile or even craven about these women so we do not have to confront that we too are not safe from predators. This is less about sexual violence, as harrowing as it is, than it is about victimhood. The same effect can be seen among those who were financially defrauded by Epstein, who are often portrayed as greedy or foolish. It is the just-world hypothesis, a cognitive bias in motion, a defensive move to support our belief that the world is fair and not random in order to protect our sense of safety. So, in this formulation, the victim must have done something wrong or there must have been something wrong with them.

Jena-Lisa Jones.

The true crime industry’s structural bias toward the killer’s narrative over the victims — the perpetrator salience bias — is another example of how we can subtly, perhaps accidentally, dehumanize. Think about how much we have heard from Ted Bundy or John Wayne Gacy’s rambling about their crimes compared to what we have heard from their living victims or the loved ones of those who did not survive. It was on full display this week: two nights before the anniversary of his conviction, the man convicted of murdering four University of Idaho students sent a rambling missive proclaiming his innocence to The New York Times; the next night, he filed a handwritten habeas petition. In Kohberger’s case, the perpetrator salience bias isn’t something that simply worked in his favor — it’s something he engineered. The timing, landing on the eve of his victims’ anniversary, guaranteed the spotlight would fall on him rather than on them.

When it comes to victims — a point you can hear from the mouths of Gabby Petito’s own parents — there is a certain privilege that comes from being young, white and relatable to people who have platforms. There is an academic concept called missing white woman syndrome that refers to the disproportionate media coverage of missing-persons cases involving young, attractive, white women compared to men or women of color. Socioeconomic and racial proximity to the assumed media consumer is a key factor in this phenomenon. Researchers have also concluded that much of this is driven by a paternalistic culture where white women are framed as uniquely vulnerable, innocent and in need of protection by the state and society. This narrative reinforces harmful gender power dynamics, but it also leaves many behind. This is illustrated painfully by the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women’s crisis. When I look into the eyes of Ashley Loring HeavyRunner in the pictures her sister posts, I don’t see a missing Indigenous woman. I see a missing human. When I look at her friend and fellow tribal member, Leo Wagner, who went missing a few years after searching for her, I see another human.

Another trap we fall into at times is that disliking someone’s politics, views or work bleeds into discounting their loss. I felt this pull myself in the aftermath of the shooting of conservative political activist Charlie Kirk. Others felt the same after the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. We have to guard against letting moral disgust curdle into outgroup dehumanization. Taking the time to write about Kirk as a human was therapeutic and grounding. I needed to face that someone that day lost a father, a husband, a colleague, a friend.

We have done this before, at far greater cost. American soldiers in Vietnam didn’t fight the Vietcong. They fought ‘Charlie’ — a nickname that turned a person into a radio call sign, easier to kill than a man with a mother and a name. Language is the first casualty of dehumanization, and the last thing we recover once the shooting stops.

In the same 2023 interview, Fountain told me the story of a ten-year-old boy named Rodney. Fountain described Rodney as a “kind of a man-child, taking care of his mom and his family.” One night, Rodney didn’t come home. His mother thought he was staying with a relative or a friend. As a man was getting ready for work the next morning, he saw a ruckus and went to investigate it and found the body of the little boy. He had been mauled to death by dogs who had begun to eat his body. Fountain got the green light to begin working on the story and, then, as he was packing to go to the airport, he got a call from an editor who said the senior editors “don’t want you to do the story.”

Fountain pressed the editor for an answer about why and after, as he said, “some verbal tussle” and “he says, ‘they say we already have a dog story.’” The dog story was about an elderly couple in California who had apparently been attacked by pit bulls but survived. “This was not a dog story,” Fountain told me. I told Fountain that if it had been a white child in the suburbs of Atlanta or Washington, DC it would be a front-page story over the world. Fountain told a similar story about fifty-one, mostly Black women murdered in Chicago whose deaths received almost no coverage.

“If there were fifty-one dogs or cats in the city of Chicago that were killed,” Fountain said, “that would be front-page news and it would be continual.”

There are no dog stories. Just boys and girls who don’t come home.

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