It is useful to distinguish the content of thoughts from the mechanisms of thinking. Some biases (e.g., preconceived notions, unscientific beliefs, specific stereotypes) are biases of content and are likely to be culture-bound. Other biases (e.g., the neglect of statistics, the neglect of ambiguity, the general fact that we are prone to stereotyping) are inevitable side effects of the operation of general-purpose psychological mechanisms.
