firecat

This one seems like a tautology to me. It all depends on how "basic" you think certain operations are, and how you frame the operations in question. "Tolerance for ambiguity" is itself a way ambiguous phrase -- for example, does it mean comfort with not knowing what class of entity something fits into, or does it mean comfort with knowing that something fits into a class one of who characteristics is ambiguity? (Same thing with racism and other prejudices -- does familiarity cause people to become in general more comfortable with people who are not like them, or "merely" to move a certain subset of people not like them into the "OK" category?)

I think that shortcut to reduce ambiguity are a basic operation, but the fact that we use those at all (the basic operation you can't change) may not say that much about the circumstances under which we use them (non-basic operation, at least in my taxonomy.)