Many people mistakenly believe that minorities are responsible for more crimes in this country than Caucasians. This is most likely due to the media's increased focus on minorities, which makes many viewers fall prey to the heuristic.

This makes many viewers fall prey to the representative heuristic.

Explanation:

The representative heuristic is a cognitive bias in which one tend to assess and organize objects according to a specific prototype. The individual bases the objects according to a previously learnt pattern or similar experiences.

This is why, due to the media's increased focus on minorities (which tends to create a pattern about them), many people mistakenly believe that these minorities are responsible for more crimes. They form this cognitive bias.

unless they converted, many non-christians (mainly jews and muslims) were persecuted

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