Bias

7 Key excerpts on "Bias"

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  eBook - ePub

  Controversies in Psychology

  • Phil Banyard(Author)
  • 2003(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  4 Bias in psychology

  Introduction

  It is interesting that we have a title such as ‘Bias in psychology’. It seems obvious to me that everything in psychology contains some sort of Bias or other, but what is remarkable is that this Bias is often not acknowledged. Perhaps this is because one feature of the scientific approach in psychology is the attempt to be objective. To be objective is usually taken to mean standing apart from the subject that is being studied, and being free from Bias. This might be possible if we are studying chemicals or micro-organisms, but is it possible to be objective when we are studying the behaviour and experience of people? It is difficult, if not impossible, to stand apart from the subject that is being studied when the subject is human behaviour and experience and you are a human being. In this chapter we will look at some examples of Bias in psychology, and pay particular attention to issues around cultural diversity and gender. We will start by looking at the concept of ethnocentrism.

  Ethnocentrism

  One source of Bias in psychology comes from the fact that we tend to see things from our own viewpoint and the viewpoint of people like us. In our everyday lives we are asked to make judgments about people and events. We have a range of opinions that we are prepared to offer to other people when asked, and sometimes when not asked. In our judgments we are often inclined to show a little egocentrism (seeing things from our own particular viewpoint to the exclusion of others). Another Bias that can affect our judgments is ethnocentrism

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  Understanding and Navigating Discrimination in America

  • Jamie Maniloff(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Omnigraphics

    (Publisher)

  PART ONE Understanding Bias, Prejudice, and Discrimination CHAPTER ONE Defining Bias, Prejudice, and Discrimination Despite becoming more and more common in public conversation, terms like “Bias,” “preju-dice,” and “discrimination” are often a source of confusion because they tend to overlap. While most people have a basic understanding of each term, there is often room for deeper understanding depending on the context and situation at hand, and how terms are inter-related. While all these terms build on each other in various ways, Bias is typically the root of it all. Thus, it is a crucial, if not central, to the larger concept of discrimination. IMPLICIT Bias “Explicit Bias” refers to Bias that we are aware of, while implicit Bias (sometimes referred to as cognitive Bias) is both naturally occurring and subconscious. We all have implicit Biases, which makes them particularly important to address and control in our pursuit of equality. Implicit Bias results from a combination of nature and nurture, meaning it is an outcome of our biological makeup and our social environment — especially the context we were raised in. In terms of biology, implicit Bias is partly due to the workings of the brain. Human brains have the difficult task of coping with an incredible amount of information at every waking moment. Since our brains typically do such a great job of managing these different stimuli, we rarely give a second thought to just how much data our minds must deal with. The sheer volume and detail of everything we hear and see, on top of all the things we are constantly thinking and feeling (both emotionally and physically) is certainly remarkable. Yet, if our brains did not take shortcuts to process and categorize this information, the amount of data ingested would be completely unbearable. By making generalizations through associations and assumptions, implicit Bias allows us to manage daily life, which often requires us to make quick decisions.

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  Argumentation

  The Art of Persuasion

  • Raymond S. Nickerson(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  Generally speaking, people who do better on the various tests of cognitive ability tend to be less likely to display the more common Biases. And people who perform normatively, or nearly so, with one task, are likely to perform normatively, or nearly so, on other tasks as well. Evans (1989) argues that all the kinds of Biases that have been found in reasoning tasks stem primarily from selective processing of problem infor- mation: “the major cause of Bias in human reasoning and judgment lies in factors which induce people to process the problem information in a selective manner. Such selection may arise either in the process of forming mental representations of the information presented in the pro- blem or else in the actual manner in which it is subsequently processed” (p. 19). The impossibility of processing all the sensory data with which we are continually bombarded makes selection essential; the challenge to the student of cognition, Evans argues, is to discover why the selection process sometimes yields systematic mistakes in reasoning. The Functionality or Dysfunctionality of Biases A tacit assumption underlying much of the relevant psychological litera- ture is that Biases of the sort described are bad – irrational aspects of human cognition. They cause people to reason illogically, to draw unwarranted conclusions, and to form and retain unfounded beliefs. Jonathan Baron (1985) summarizes his view of the situation the following way. “People will in general think too little, search for evidence to confirm what they already favor, and use evidence the same way – unless corrective action has been provided. We may thus expect people (without corrective education) to exhibit Biases predominantly in one direction, and therefore to be generally irrational. This is the main empirical prediction of the present theory” (p. 129). This is a fairly negative general assessment of the role of Biases in thinking and of the prospects for changing things much for the better.

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  Criminal Investigative Failures

  • D. Kim Rossmo(Author)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Finally, data that do not fit the Bias or context and cannot easily be ignored are dismissed and explained away, and weighting of disconfirming data is low. These and other manifestations of Bias and cognitive influences can make perception, judgment, and decision making unreliable. They are Human Perception, Judgment, and Decision Making 57 well researched and documented by many scientific studies (e.g., Balcetis & Dunning, 2006; Cordelia, 2006; Ditto & Lopez, 1992; Edwards & Smith, 1996; Evans, 1989; Gilovich et al., 2002; Haselton, Nettle, & Andrews, 2005; Hogarth, 1980; Kahneman et al., 1982; Koriat, Lichtenstein, & Fischhoff, 1980; Kunda, 1990; Nickerson, 1998; Nisbett & Ross, 1980; Tversky & Kahneman, 1974; Zhaoping & Guyader, 2007). The criminal justice system, for example, has in many ways adopted and taken on board these and other cognitive and psychological findings to improve investigations (e.g., Ask & Granhag, 2005; Risinger & Loop, 2002; Stelfox & Pease, 2005). A clear case is the way in which line-ups are conducted. Rather than Biasing eyewitnesses by presenting them with the suspect (the target), eyewitnesses are presented with a range of targets that include the suspect as well as numerous decoys. The line-up procedures have been drastically improved by taking into account issues of Bias and other cognitive and psychological influences (e.g., Charman & Wells, 2006; Turtle, Lindsay, & Wells, 2003; Wells & Olson, 2003). In this chapter we present cogni-tive theory and bridge it to practical situations in the real world of investiga-tions. Of course, within the scope of this chapter we can only bring examples, as illustrations, to convey the complex issues at hand. Initial Impressions and Accountability Research indicates that early impressions have considerable influence on our final evaluations. Indeed, it is common for people to maintain preex-isting beliefs despite dissonant or even contradictory evidence.

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  Rethinking Psychology

  Good Science, Bad Science, Pseudoscience

  • Brian Hughes(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Red Globe Press

    (Publisher)

  194 Psychology and Pseudoscience in Context Politically subjective psychology This might just about be excusable if it were the case that political Bias was evenly distributed in psychology. However, it has been observed that academic and scientific psychologists (in Europe and North America) are predominantly Biased in one political direction. Specifically, in the relevant surveys, a large majority of these psychologists self-identify as political liberals. The prevalence of liberal political orientation in psychology has been gradually increasing over the course of its history. According to recent polls, some 84 per cent of US-based psychologists self-identify as political liberals, with only 8 per cent declaring as conservatives (Duarte, Crawford, Stern, Haidt, Jussim, & Tetlock, 2015). This is very far removed from the demographic pattern across the US population as a whole, where national surveys show liberals to have been outnumbered by conservatives for many years (Gallup, 2014). The challenge of liberal Bias in psychology was high-lighted in 2011, when US social psychologist Jonathan Haidt of New York University delivered a keynote lecture at the annual conference of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (Duarte, Crawford, Stern, Haidt, Jussim, & Tetlock, 2015). During the course of his speech he asked his audi-ence to indicate their political views by raising their hands. Only three audi-ence members – from a total of over 1,000 – raised their hands to say they were social conservatives (compared with over 800 of the audience who did so to indicate they were liberals). Surveys conducted with international social psychology groups have emulated this overall pattern of pro-liberal consensus (Inbar & Lammers, 2012). Notwithstanding the commitment to objectivity that individual research-ers might hold, the risk is that implicit confirmation Bias will arbitrarily drive certain types of data interpretation.

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  Why Philosophy?

  • Paolo Diego Bubbio, Jeff Malpas, Paolo Diego Bubbio, Jeff Malpas(Authors)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter

    (Publisher)

  By furthering our understanding of these and similar unconscious or unin-tended forms of Bias and prejudice, recent philosophical research on implicit  B. Keith Payne, 2001, pp. 181 – 192.  Dan-Olof Rooth, 2010, pp. 523 – 534.  Jens Agerström and Dan-Olof Rooth, 2011, pp. 790 – 805. 52 Lisa Bortolotti and Katherine Puddifoot Bias illustrates the substantial contribution that philosophy can make to under-standing the nature of human thought and how it influences interpersonal inter-actions. In the domain of implicit Bias research philosophy is also at its most practical: providing insights about potential ways to reduce the implicit stereo-typing involved with implicit Bias. 2.1 The Psychology of Implicit Bias One strand of philosophical research into implicit Bias aims to identify the psy-chological underpinnings of implicit Bias. It aims to answer the question, what, precisely, are implicit Biases? How do implicit Biases relate to better-recognized psychological states? For example, much recent philosophical discussion has aimed to answer the question: “ How do implicit Biases relate to beliefs? ” For a significant number of the years during which implicit Biases have been studied, it has been assumed in the psychological literature that they are merely associations that people make in their thinking — for example, one might associ-ate social groups (e. g., women ) and their members with concepts ( weakness ) or feelings ( aversion ) — and that they can only be changed via retraining. They have been distinguished from other mental states on the basis that the believer is often unaware of or unable to control the operation of implicit Biases.

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  The SAGE Handbook of Organization Studies

  • Stewart R Clegg, Cynthia Hardy, Tom Lawrence, Walter R Nord, Stewart R Clegg, Cynthia Hardy, Tom Lawrence, Walter R Nord(Authors)
  • 2006(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  Social cognition is a rich and broad perspective represented in various fields and disciplines, particu-larly within social and cognitive psychology. Because of the blend of various issues and methodologies used throughout research in the field, many of the concepts and developments are easily applicable to understanding the cognitions and behaviour of people in structured social contexts such as organi-zations. We will return to the relevance of these theories when we consider their application to OB later in the chapter. Behavioural Decision Theory The standard of economic rationality has long been the cornerstone of the formal study of decision making. Individuals were assumed to act in accord with their self-interest and make choices that were consistent with the predictions of maximizing this self-interest. The tenets of rational action, however, have not proved particularly useful in describing the actual choice or decision behaviour of individuals, nor were they particularly useful in prescribing or predicting actual choice behaviour. Real decision makers typically behaved in ways that deviated from the predictions of economic models, made deci-sions that were not Pareto efficient, and were incon-sistent in their choices or made decisions based on normatively irrelevant factors (Bazerman 2001). From the perspective of economic rationality, these errors were assumed to be the result of ignorance, lack of correct incentives, or unrevealed preferences. What was presumed to be a result of inattention, ignorance, or error by those subscribing to the notion of rational decision making was viewed by another group of researchers as systematic varia-tions that were, in their own right, deserving of attention. The systematic study of choice, especially in the behavioural sciences, had as its roots in the publication, almost 40 years ago, of Nobel-prize winner Herbert Simon (1957; March and Simon 1958).

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