Here's a really interesting study about false positives. In short, participants were shown dots of various shades of blue and purple and asked to identify the blue dots. The less frequently they were shown blue dots, the more likely people were to misidentify purple dots as blue.
It reminds me of a quote about Amos Tversky and that he "merely studied in a systematic way things about behaviour that were already known to advertisers and used-car salesmen".
It seems that this group of researchers are studying the heuristic "If your only tool is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail." Invoking the Lindy Effect, the phrase seems to have a long history, although not well documented, giving it survival value.
[Now comes the dangerous part where we take some data about the color of dots and extrapolate it to explain human behavior.]
If you see the world as a conflict between oppressors and victims, you will eventually see blue dots that are actually purple as our society grows more just and prosperous and these instances become less common.
"Although modern societies have made extraordinary progress in solving a wide range of social problems, from poverty and illiteracy to violence and infant mortality, the majority of people believe that the world is getting worse. The fact that concepts grow larger when their instances grow smaller may be one source of that pessimism."
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