This is the most significant distortion and the one that carries the most consequences. In order to be able to put things in general context, you do not have everything you know in your mind at all times, so you retrieve the knowledge that you require at any given time in a piecemeal fashion, which puts these retrieved knowledge chunks in their local context. This means that you have an arbitrary reference point and react to differences from that point, forgetting that you are only looking at the differences from that particular perspective of the local context, not the absolutes.
