[Dawnstorm]

Originally Posted by Triple_R

If you agree that arranged marriage is "an archaic concept that boils down to little more than slavery" than aren't you effectively "biased" against it?

Yes.

Also, I have to frank - I find it silly to expect humans to overcome any bias that we may have. We're human beings, not perfectly objective machines. It's when we think we're holding no bias at all that we are actually at our most biased, in my view - Because it gives us a false sense of "higher ground" compared to others.

I agree.

The fact is that we all have culturally/socially-ingrained biases, and the most we can realistically hope to do is to recognize them in ourselves and try to temper them/account for them.

I'm not fixed on terminology, here. "Overcome" is synaesthetic's word. I'm fine with "to temper" or "account for them", though. Here's what I said in my original post:

I was so biased against arranged marriages that it took me a while to "get" the story; watching this one has been a very interesting cultural experience for me.

Here, my bias was an impediment to understanding. I could have raged against the show, saying it's not nearly critical enough of arranged marriages. And even if - considering my own biases - I'd have been right, it'd have been an accident. If I hadn't relativised my gut reactions, I wouldn't have got the show. (Of course, I'm still not sure I actually got the show; my interpretation might easily be another sort of misunderstanding.)

When I say "cultural experience" above, I mean that by confronting my bias in that one instances I learned to understand things better (or I got the illusion of understanding things better) that express themselves in many anime: like the gap between what you say and what you mean, some things about respect... None of these concepts are culturally specific, but all of them are culturally flavoured - sometimes to the point that they seem alien. Can you imagine a Hollywood remake of Ai Yori Aoshi?