For instance, if you state that (paraphrasing) racism is wrapped up in 'in-group bias' and it turns out that people are actually racist because of something in our DNA (similar to being afraid of spiders) or something like that (NB: completely contrived, to provide context related to your comment), the you would have lost the truth in a higher abstraction layer, by hiding the underlying principle.
Now, abstraction is a helpful tool, but it should be used to abstract things to the level necessary to convey an exact message. Einstein might have said, "Abstract things as high and low as necessary, while preserving the truth, but no higher or lower."... but in the meantime, I made that quote up.
Take, for instance, my "Anchoring" example. There are more fundamental things that are going on beneath the "Anchoring" abstraction. Perhaps a specific part of the human psyche, which is also responsible for recognizing patterns (e.g., Reticular Activating System) is also responsible for the mental constructs that lead to such a cognitive bias. But, once that science is understood sufficiently enough to be trusted, a concept like "Anchoring" is a helpful delineation.
In the aforementioned case of racism that I contrived, the abstraction layer of "racism" and the perceived lower level abstraction "in-group bias" hides the truth, and this fallacious abstraction actually becomes, as Noam Chomsky might suggest, a part of our mental grammar, which prevents us from ever learning the truth, unless the abstraction is broken in our minds.
