Cognitive Bias, Interoception, and the Role of Distress Tolerance
When we talk about cognitive bias, we tend to frame it as a mental glitch — a kind of psychological misfire that distorts how we see the world. But the deeper truth is that bias is often a form of emotional regulation.
Most people aren’t biased because they’re irrational. They’re biased because certain beliefs feel better than others, and they don’t have the internal capacity to sit with what doesn’t feel good.
Cognitive bias isn’t just about faulty thinking. It’s an attempt to reduce distress.
Why Confirmation Bias Feels So Good
Take confirmation bias, the tendency to seek out and favor information that supports what we already believe. It’s easy to dismiss this as laziness or ego. But in many cases, it’s about emotional safety.
Agreeing with something feels good. It’s regulating. It lets the body relax.
Disagreeing, especially with something that challenges your identity, values, or worldview, often brings up discomfort: tension, anxiety, shame, confusion. For many people, those sensations aren’t just unpleasant. They’re unbearable.
That’s where interoception and distress tolerance come in.
Interoception: The Feelings Behind the Beliefs
Interoception is the body’s sense of its internal state—things like heart rate, breath, tightness, nausea, calm, heat, dread. It’s how we feel our feelings.
But when interoception is disrupted, as it often is in people with trauma or chronic stress, we may not know how to interpret those feelings. All we know is that something feels “off,” and our brain scrambles to resolve it.
Confirmation bias becomes a shortcut. It restores internal ease.
It’s not just that we like beliefs that match ours. It’s that those beliefs help us feel okay, and we’re unconsciously motivated to reach conclusions that offer that relief.
Distress Tolerance Shapes How We Think
Distress tolerance is the capacity to stay with discomfort without reacting, avoiding, or collapsing. When that capacity is low, we’re more likely to:
Avoid ambiguity
React quickly
Cling to certainty
Choose emotional comfort over truth
In other words, we become more biased, not because we’re weak thinkers, but because we can’t handle the feeling of being uncertain, wrong, challenged, or overwhelmed.
And when trauma reduces distress tolerance, it also increases the appeal of simpler beliefs because they’re easier to hold.
Explore the neural mechanisms behind internal body awareness and discover how interoception influences emotion, decision-making, trauma, and social connection.
Why Us/Them Thinking Feels Safer
This helps explain why so many social and political biases rely on binary, us/them narratives. These stories offer clear categories, moral clarity, and group belonging, all of which help regulate internal distress by simplifying emotional ambiguity.
Some common binary-promoting biases include:
Ingroup bias: favoring those who are like us, not just out of loyalty but because difference feels destabilizing
Group homogeneity bias: assuming “they” are all the same, which flattens nuance and simplifies emotional responses to out-groups
Fundamental attribution error: assuming others’ actions reflect who they are, while our actions reflect our circumstances
Belief bias: judging arguments not by logic, but by whether we already agree with the conclusion
False dilemma: framing issues as either/or when they’re actually more complex
System justification: feeling safer believing that existing systems are fair, even when they’re not
These aren’t just mental shortcuts. They’re emotional coping strategies. They reduce discomfort by simplifying the world. A more complex view would require more distress tolerance, more interoceptive grounding, and more capacity to sit with difference, contradiction, and ambiguity.
A simpler world feels better, but it doesn’t always serve us.
Negativity Bias Isn’t Just Evolutionary
People often say that negativity bias, the tendency to focus more on threats than positives, is an evolutionary trait. And it is. But in trauma work, it’s also a psychological survival strategy.
Many people hold persistent beliefs like:
No one ever listens
I can’t depend on anyone
It’s just safer to assume the worst
These aren’t just thoughts. They’re interoceptive expectations, shaped by experience. They live in the body as tension, vigilance, and protective detachment. They may have once been adaptive, and they still shape how people scan, interpret, and react to the world.
Availability Heuristic — What’s Familiar Feels True
Another common bias is the availability heuristic, the tendency to believe something is more common, likely, or important simply because it’s easier to recall. In other words, what comes to mind easily feels more true.
But this, too, is about more than memory. It’s about what the nervous system is primed to notice.
Someone with a history of relational trauma, for example, may more readily recall moments of betrayal than moments of trust, not because they’re being dramatic, but because those moments carried more emotional intensity. The interoceptive trace of betrayal — the tension, nausea, heartache — may still live in the body, making those memories feel more real.
So when someone says, “People always let me down,” they’re not just expressing a belief. They’re naming what’s most available in their internal landscape, and the more emotionally loaded the memory, the more available it becomes.
In this way, the availability heuristic becomes not just a cognitive shortcut, but a body-based pattern of attention and meaning that often reinforces bias through the lens of past pain.
The Complexity of Gut Feelings
One of the more complex biases is the affect heuristic, the tendency to believe something is true because it feels true.
This isn’t always a mistake. Sometimes what we call “gut instinct” is based on rapid, unconscious pattern detection supported by regions like the orbitofrontal cortex, which integrates sensory and emotional input to make fast judgments. In some cases, those feelings are accurate. They’re informed by subtle cues we don’t consciously register.
But sometimes, that feeling is just another form of confirmation bias, a familiar nervous system pattern that happens to feel “right” because it’s well-worn, not because it’s true.
This is where self-awareness, pacing, and reflection matter. It’s not about distrusting all gut feelings. It’s about knowing the difference between regulation and resonance — between what feels safe and what’s actually grounded.
So What Do We Do With This?
If bias is shaped by interoception and distress, then clarity isn’t just a cognitive skill — it’s a somatic capacity.
Helping people think more clearly means helping them:
Feel more safely
Stay with discomfort longer
Recognize the bodily signals behind belief
Build capacity for complexity, contradiction, and uncertainty
We don’t eliminate bias by shaming people or giving them more data. We reduce its grip by supporting regulation, agency, and curiosity.
This is why trauma-informed work matters not just in therapy, but in education, conflict resolution, journalism, and public discourse. The more regulated our bodies are, the more flexible our thinking becomes.
Final Thoughts
Bias isn’t just a cognitive flaw. It’s often the nervous system trying to keep us safe. But safety doesn’t have to come from certainty. It can come from capacity, the ability to stay present with discomfort long enough to learn something new.
In a world full of noise and pressure, the most radical thing we can do might be this: Pause. Feel. Reflect. And let truth be something we’re willing to tolerate.
Author
Dr. Mark Olson holds an M.A. in Education and a Ph.D. in Neuroscience from the University of Illinois, specializing in Cognitive and Behavioral Neuropsychology and Neuroanatomy. His research focused on memory, attention, eye movements, and aesthetic preferences. Dr. Olson is also a NARM® practitioner, aquatic therapist, and published author on chronic pain and trauma-informed care. He offers a variety of courses at Dr-Olson.com that provide neuroscientific insights into the human experience and relational skill training for professionals and curious laypersons.
