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Javier E

Implicit Bias Training Isn't Improving Corporate Diversity - Bloomberg - 0 views

www.bloomberg.com/...-improving-corporate-diversity

training bias effectiveness racism diversity

shared by Javier E on 05 Aug 20 - No Cached
  • despite the growing adoption of unconscious bias training, there is no convincing scientific evidence that it works
  • In fact, much of the academic evidence on implicit bias interventions highlights their weakness as a method for boosting diversity and inclusion. Instructions to suppress stereotypes often have the opposite effect, and prejudice reduction programs are much more effective when people are already open-minded, altruistic, and concerned about their prejudices to begin with.
  • This is because the main problem with stereotypes is not that people are unaware of them, but that they agree with them (even when they don’t admit it to others). In other words, most people have conscious biases.
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  • Moreover, to the extent that people have unconscious biases, there is no clear-cut way to measure them
  • The main tool for measuring unconscious bias, the Implicit Association Test (IAT), has been in use for twenty years but is highly contested.
  • meta-analytic reviews have concluded that IAT scores — in other words, unconscious biases — are very weak predictors of actual behavior.
  • The vast majority of people labeled “racist” by these tests behave the same as the vast majority of people labelled “non-racist.” Do we really want to tell people who behave in non-racist ways that they are unconsciously racists, or, conversely, tell people who behave in racist ways that they aren’t, deep down, racists at all?
  • This gets to the underlying flaw with unconscious bias trainings: behaviors, not thoughts, should be the target of diversity and inclusion interventions.
  • Scientific evidence suggests that the relationship between attitudes and behaviors is much weaker than one might expect.
  • Even if we lived in a world in which humans always acted in accordance with their beliefs, there would remain better ways to promote diversity than by policing people’s thoughts.
  • Organizations should focus less on extinguishing their employees’ unconscious thoughts, and more on nurturing ethical, benevolent, and inclusive behaviors.
  • This means focusing less on employees’ attitudes, and more on organizational policies and systems, as these play the key role creating the conditions that entice employees (and leaders) to behave in more or less inclusive ways.
  • Instead of worrying what people think of something or someone deep down, we should focus on ways to eliminate the toxic or prejudiced behaviors we can see. That alone will drive a great deal of progress.
  • Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic is chief talent scientist at Manpower Group and a professor at University College London and Columbia University.
carolinewren

Media Bias - 0 views

www.studentnewsdaily.com/types-of-media-bias

bias media

shared by carolinewren on 15 May 15 - No Cached
  • Since citizens cannot cast informed votes or make knowledgeable decisions on matters of public policy if the information on which they depend is distorted, it is vital to American democracy that television news and other media be fair and unbiased.
  • the majority of Americans believe that the mass media slant reports in favor of the liberal position on current issues.
  • A reporter’s job is to present a balanced story.
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  • bias by omission can occur either within a story, or over the long term as a particular news outlet reports one set of events, but not another
  • Experts in news stories are like expert witnesses in trials.
  • Journalists often go looking for quotes to fit their favorite argument into a news story
  •   If charges of impropriety are leveled at two politicians of approximately equal power, one liberal and one conservative, compare the amount of coverage given to each.
  • Story placement is a measure of how important the editor considers the story. 
  • Bias by placement is where on a website (or newspaper) or in an article a story or event is printed; a pattern of placing news stories so as to downplay information supportive of either conservative views or liberal views
  • tagging of conservative politicians and groups with extreme labels while leaving liberal politicians and groups unlabeled or with more mild labels, or vice versa.
  • bias by labeling occurs when a reporter not only fails to identify a liberal as a liberal or a conservative as a conservative, but describes the person or group with positive labels, such as “an expert” or “independent consumer group.”
  • the reporter imparts an air of authority that the source does not deserve.
  • Bias by spin occurs when the story has only one interpretation of an event or policy, to the exclusion of the other; spin involves tone – it’s a reporter’s subjective comments about objective facts; makes one side’s ideological perspective look better than another.
carolinewren

How Media Bias Is Killing Black America - The Root - 0 views

www.theroot.com/..._is_killing_black_america.html

media bias

shared by carolinewren on 03 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • leads to both the erasure and criminalization of marginalized communities, has had dire consequences for both the psyches and lived experiences of black people in the United States since at least the 18th century,
  • “This is the press, an irresponsible press,” he said. “It will make the criminal look like he’s the victim and make the victim look like he’s the criminal. If you aren’t careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.”
  • Many studies have tackled implicit racial bias in law enforcement, health care and the legal field. In recent years, the phrase has become a buzzword used to broadly frame bigotry and racism as something so entrenched that some people aren’t aware that they subconsciously harbor racist feelings, associating black skin with negative behavior
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  • their “conditioning has been conditioned,” and marginalized groups are often left to pick up the pieces in the wake of brutality and/or neglect by those in positions of power, trust and influence.
  • tackles media bias (pdf) and how it indiscriminately pathologizes communities of color for mass consumption.
  • “Implicit bias impacts the way black communities are treated across practically all sectors of life in America, from courtrooms to doctors’ offices,
  • “The media is no different, whether it be the use of pejorative terms like ‘thug’ and ‘animal’ to describe protesters in Ferguson and Baltimore, or the widespread overreporting of crime stories involving black suspects in New York City.”
  • Media bias not only negatively impacts black America’s relationship with law enforcement and the judicial system (pdf) but also extends to how African Americans are perceived in society at large.
  • “Television newsrooms are nearly 80 percent white, according to the Radio and Television News Directors Association, while radio newsrooms are 92 percent white,”
  • “The percentage of minority journalists has remained between 12 and 14 percent for more than a decade.”
  • This lays the groundwork for an intrinsically racist media structure that, according to The Atlantic’s Riva Gold, means “news organizations are losing their ability to empower, represent, and—especially in cases where language ability is crucial—even to report on minority populations in their communities.”
katedriscoll

Confirmation bias - 0 views

www.sciencedaily.com/...confirmation_bias.htm

shared by katedriscoll on 28 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • In psychology and cognitive science, confirmation bias (or confirmatory bias) is a tendency to search for or interpret information in a way that confirms one's preconceptions, leading to statistical errors. Confirmation bias is a type of cognitive bias and represents an error of inductive inference toward confirmation of the hypothesis under study. Confirmation bias is a phenomenon wherein decision makers have been shown to actively seek out and assign more weight to evidence that confirms their hypothesis, and ignore or underweigh evidence that could disconfirm their hypothesis. As such, it can be thought of as a form of selection bias in collecting evidence.
katedriscoll

The Confirmation Bias: Why People See What They Want to See - Effectiviology - 0 views

effectiviology.com/confirmation-bias

shared by katedriscoll on 28 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • The confirmation bias is a cognitive bias that causes people to search for, favor, interpret, and recall information in a way that confirms their preexisting beliefs. For example, if someone is presented with a lot of information on a certain topic, the confirmation bias can cause them to only remember the bits of information that confirm what they already thought.The confirmation bias influences people’s judgment and decision-making in many areas of life, so it’s important to understand it. As such, in the following article you will first learn more about the confirmation bias, and then see how you can reduce its influence, both in other people’s thought process as well as in your own.
katedriscoll

What Is the Function of Confirmation Bias? | SpringerLink - 1 views

link.springer.com/...s10670-020-00252-1

shared by katedriscoll on 28 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Confirmation bias is one of the most widely discussed epistemically problematic cognitions, challenging reliable belief formation and the correction of inaccurate views. Given its problematic nature, it remains unclear why the bias evolved and is still with us today. To offer an explanation, several philosophers and scientists have argued that the bias is in fact adaptive. I critically discuss three recent proposals of this kind before developing a novel alternative, what I call the ‘reality-matching account’
  • Confirmation bias is typically viewed as an epistemically pernicious tendency. For instance, Mercier and Sperber (2017: 215) maintain that the bias impedes the formation of well-founded beliefs, reduces people’s ability to correct their mistaken views, and makes them, when they reason on their own, “become overconfident” (Mercier 2016: 110).
sanderk

The 'Availability Bias' Is Driving Investor Decisions - Business Insider - 0 views

www.businessinsider.com/ing-investor-decisions-2012-10

availability decisions knowledge psychology Bias research

shared by sanderk on 24 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • What availability bias tells us is that investors’ lingering perceptions of a dire market environment may be causing them to view investment opportunities through an overly negative lens, making it less appealing to consider taking on investment risk, no matter how small the returns on perceived “safe” investments.
  • “Imagine if I was a financial advisor and you came to talk to me about your risk attitude, and I started the discussion by asking you to describe how you felt in the last three years on the days when your portfolio lost 5% of its value. Then I asked you what your risk attitude was. Most people would say they don’t want to ever experience days like that again. On the other hand, what if instead I talked about people I knew who were retired and living in the Bahamas, fishing and golfing. Now your risk attitude would probably be different.”
  • As humans, our thinking is strongly influenced by what is personally most relevant, recent or dramatic.
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  • lingering perceptions based on dramatic, painful events are impacting decision-making even when those events are over.
  • Ariely said a home country investment bias might be generated by two perceptual factors.“The first is an overly optimistic belief about one’s own economy; an expectation of performance in their country that is higher than what would be statistically realistic. The second reason is most likely due to procedural difficulties in investing outside the country – such as less knowledge about how to access these markets.”
  • investors may be making decisions driven more by personal bias or irrational belief than by reality and, in doing so, they may be hindering their own investment success.
  • The problem? These decisions may hinder their ability to reach their desired retirement or savings goals. The choice is between changing the goal—or changing the means of reaching it.
oliviaodon

Confirmation bias in science: how to avoid it | Ars Technica - 0 views

arstechnica.com/...firmation-bias-how-to-avoid-it

shared by oliviaodon on 09 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • One of the most common arguments against a scientific finding is confirmation bias: the scientist or scientists only look for data that confirms a desired conclusion. Confirmation bias is remarkably common—it is used by psychics, mediums, mentalists, and homeopaths, just to name a few. As you may guess from such a list, deliberate use of confirmation bias is held in low esteem by scientists, and allowing confirmation bias to get the better of your results is regarded as a particularly sad form of incompetence. Yet, whenever science meets some ideological barrier, scientists are accused of, at best, self-deception, and, at worst, deliberate fraud.
Javier E

I Was Wrong, and So Are You - Magazine - The Atlantic - 1 views

www.theatlantic.com/...8713

confirmation bias economics research

shared by Javier E on 14 Nov 11 - No Cached
  • The proper inference from our work is not that one group is more enlightened, or less. It’s that “myside bias”—the tendency to judge a statement according to how conveniently it fits with one’s settled position—is pervasive among all of America’s political groups. The bias is seen in the data, and in my actions.
  • we tabulated the average number of incorrect answers for each ideological group. On average, those who described themselves as progressive (or “very liberal”) got 5.3 of the 8 questions wrong, liberal 4.7, moderate 3.7, conservative 1.7, very conservative 1.3, and libertarian 1.4. These were the results published in Econ Journal Watch and broadcast in The Wall Street Journal.
  • You may have noticed that several of the statements we analyzed implicitly challenge positions held by the left, while none specifically challenges conservative or libertarian positions. A great deal of research shows that people are more likely to heed information that supports their prior positions, and discard or discount contrary information.
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  • A full tabulation of all 17 questions showed that no group clearly out-stupids the others. They appear about equally stupid when faced with proper challenges to their position.
  • Psychologists would count this tendency as a manifestation of “myside bias,” or “confirmation bias.”
  • Consistently, the more a statement challenged a group’s position, the worse the group did.
  • Education had very little impact on responses, we found; survey respondents who’d gone to college did only slightly less badly than those who hadn’t.
  • the fact that a college education showed almost no effect—at least for those inclined to take such a survey—strongly suggests that the classroom is no great corrective for myside bias. At least when it comes to public-policy issues, the corrective value of professional academic experience might be doubted as well.
carolinewren

Study finds news media may influence racial bias | WBFO - 0 views

news.wbfo.org/...edia-may-influence-racial-bias

media influence bias

shared by carolinewren on 03 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • news media may influence racial bias.
  • there's already a focus of crime in local television news but of that crime African Americans tend to be over represented compared to their actual crime rates. So I began to think, well if this is going on, if we're seeing a lot of negative stereotypes within the news media, what are the lasting impacts of that over time?" 
  • "There's been a lot of research done that generally suggested that African Americans are over represented as criminals on the news,"
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  • The study found viewers who watch more local TV news demonstrate more unconscious negative attitudes toward African Americans.
  • Implicit Association Test to approach the question to determine if there may be an unconscious bias at play. The Implicit Association Test is a word association test
  • "You actually have images of African Americans and Caucasians flashed on the screen with words that you have to sort. Sometimes good words will be sorted with African American, sometimes good will be sorted with Caucasian and same with bad. What you find is generally people who are bias, it takes them longer to pare what good is supposed to be with African American than good with Caucasian. So that gets a hidden connection in the mind where negativity is generally associated with African Americans and positivity generally associated with being Caucasians."
dpittenger

A little bias in peer review scores can translate into big money, simulation finds | Sc... - 0 views

news.sciencemag.org/...ate-big-money-simulation-finds

bias science psychology

shared by dpittenger on 10 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • The scores peer reviewers award will play a big role in deciding which proposals NIH funds, and the process is extremely competitive
  • researchers from certain states, can fare unusually poorly in funding competitions, raising concerns that bias—conscious or unconscious—is skewing scores.
  • He found that bias that skews scores by just 3% can result in noticeable disparities in funding rates.
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  • In practical terms, the results meant that nonpreferred investigators had to submit higher quality grants to get money, whereas preferred investigators could get relatively lower quality grants funded. For instance, in a simulation that assumed that the top 10% of grants were funded, and that bias reduced the scores of nonpreferred applicants by an average of 3.7%, the preferred applicants got 118 funded grants, compared with just 82 from nonpreferred applicants.
katedriscoll

What Is Confirmation Bias? | Psychology Today - 0 views

www.psychologytoday.com/...what-is-confirmation-bias

shared by katedriscoll on 28 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Confirmation bias occurs from the direct influence of desire on beliefs. When people would like a certain idea or concept to be true, they end up believing it to be true. They are motivated by wishful thinking. This error leads the individual to stop gathering information when the evidence gathered so far confirms the views or prejudices one would like to be true.
  • Confirmation bias can also be found in anxious individuals, who view the world as dangerous. For example, a person with low self-esteem is highly sensitive to being ignored by other people, and they constantly monitor for signs that people might not like them. Thus, if you are worried that someone is annoyed with you, you are biased toward all the negative information about how that person acts toward you. You interpret neutral behavior as indicative of something negative.
huffem4

Infographic: 11 Cognitive Biases That Influence Political Outcomes - 1 views

www.visualcapitalist.com/tive-biases-influence-politics

social media coverage bias bias

shared by huffem4 on 23 Aug 20 - No Cached
  • when searching for facts, our own cognitive biases often get in the way.
  • The media, for example, can exploit our tendency to assign stereotypes to others by only providing catchy, surface-level information.
  • People exhibit confirmation bias when they seek information that only affirms their pre-existing beliefs. This can cause them to become overly rigid in their political opinions, even when presented with conflicting ideas or evidence.
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  • In one experiment, participants chose to either support or oppose a given sociopolitical issue. They were then presented with evidence that was conflicting, affirming, or a combination of both. In all scenarios, participants were most likely to stick with their initial decisions. Of those presented with conflicting evidence, just one in five changed their stance. Furthermore, participants who maintained their initial positions became even more confident in the superiority of their decision—a testament to how influential confirmation bias can be.
  • Coverage bias, in the context of politics, is a form of media bias where certain politicians or topics are disproportionately covered.
kaylynfreeman

Heuristics and Biases, Related But Not the Same | Psychology Today - 0 views

www.psychologytoday.com/...nd-biases-related-not-the-same

psychology brain science knowledge bias

shared by kaylynfreeman on 04 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • By treating them as the same, we miss nuances that are important for understanding human decision-making.
  • Biases—regardless of whether they are hardwired into us due to evolution, learned through socialization or direct experience—or a function of genetically influenced traits, represent predispositions to favor a given conclusion over other conclusions. Therefore, biases might be considered the leanings, priorities, and inclinations that influence our decisions[2].
  • Heuristics are mental shortcuts that allow us to make decisions more quickly, frugally, and/or accurately than if we considered additional information. They are derived from experience and formal learning and are open to continuous updates based on new experiences and information. Therefore, heuristics represent the strategies we employ to filter and attend to information[3].
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  • This preference, which is perhaps a strong one, may have resulted in a bias to maintain the status quo. You rely on heuristics to help identify your deodorant (usually by sight) and you add it to your virtual cart and place your order. In this instance, your bias influenced your preference toward your current deodorant, and your heuristic helped you to identify it. Potential stinkiness crisis averted.
  • In that case, you will likely be motivated to make a purchasing decision consistent with your strong bias (i.e., look to purchase it from a different vendor, maintaining the status quo with your deodorant). Thus, in this scenario, you decide to look elsewhere.
  • At this step, the availability heuristic is likely to guide your decision, causing you to navigate to an alternative site that quickly comes to mind[6].
  • Your heuristics will help you select an alternative product that meets some criteria.
  • satisficing heuristic (opting for the first product that looks good enough), a similarity heuristic (opting for the product that looks closest to your current deodorant) or some other heuristic to help you select the product you decide to order.
  • The question, though, is often whether your biases and heuristics are aiding or inhibiting the ecological rationality of your decision, and that will vary from situation to situation.
krystalxu

'I Knew It All Along…Didn't I?' - Understanding Hindsight Bias - Association ... - 0 views

www.psychologicalscience.org/...erstanding-hindsight-bias.html

science psychology knowledge brain science bias

shared by krystalxu on 22 Sep 17 - No Cached
  • “I knew it all along.”
  • we actually didn’t know it all along,
  • The first level of hindsight bias, memory distortion, involves misremembering an earlier opinion or judgment (“I said it would happen”
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  • . The second level, inevitability, centers on our belief that the event was inevitable (“It had to happen”)
  • Hindsight bias can also make us overconfident in how certain we are about our own judgments
  • the third level, foreseeability, involves the belief that we personally could have foreseen the event (“I knew it would happen”).
  • Research shows that we selectively recall information that confirms what we know to be true and we try to create a narrative that makes sense out of the information we have.
  • Research shows that we selectively recall information that confirms what we know to be true and we try to create a narrative that makes sense out of the information we have.
  • , it can have important consequences for the legal system, especially in cases of negligence, product liability, and medical malpractice. Studies have shown, for example, that hindsight bias routinely afflicts judgments about a defendant’s past conduct.
  • When we are encouraged to consider and explain how outcomes that didn’t happen could have happened, we counteract our usual inclination to throw out information that doesn’t fit with our narrative.
Adam Clark

Responsible Thinking: Avoiding Bias - 2 views

www.truthpizza.org/bias.htm

bias education

shared by Adam Clark on 17 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • Adam Clark on 17 Jun 14
     
    "Let's say Mrs. Smith is teaching a science class and has to give a grade to Charles, who has piercings on his face, a bizarre haircut, wears clothes she finds hideous, and has an unpleasant personality. She recognizes that none of these should influence the grade he gets in the science class: that is supposed to be a measure of his knowledge and ability in science only. If she judges his performance on class participation, she will find it very hard to exclude her bias, since he annoys her whenever he participates, whether his science knowledge is valid or not. If he makes a minor error in terminology she takes it as a sign of ignorance, while if Ryan, a neat and polite boy she likes, makes a similar mistake, she treats it as a triviality. The same can be true of their answers on essay tests."
carolinewren

Bridgegate scandal coverage puts media 'bias' on 'full display,' Christie says | NJ.com - 0 views

www.nj.com/...ge_puts_media_bias_on_ful.html

media bias coverage

shared by carolinewren on 03 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • Gov. Chris Christie insisted during his latest trip to New Hampshire that the fallout from the George Washington Bridge scandal wouldn't have been as nearly as intense if he were a Democrat.
  • argued to early-primary voters Hillary Clinton escaped scrutiny for clearing the private server housing emails from her tenure as secretary of state because she's a Democrat and he declared "bias is on full display" when that's compared to his own controversy.
  • "Could you imagine if my response the day after
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  • "As you all know, I went through a really fun time the last 15 months with lots of different people investigating me too, right?"
  • all of that happened last January was, 'Oh, by the way, ... I have a private email server and all my emails were on this private server and I deleted a bunch of them, but they were only personal, and you're going to have to take my word for it cause the servers gone."
  • "There is a bias," Christie insisted
  • not the first time the governor suggested media bias was to blame for the fallout of the George Washington Bridge lane closure controversy.
  • December 2013, a month before the now infamous "time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee" email from a top Christie staffer was revealed, Christie brushed off questions about the lane closures during a Statehouse news conference
  • "I know you guys are obsessed with this, I'm not. I'm really not. It's not that big a deal," Christie insisted. "Just because press runs around and writes about it, both here and nationally, I know why that is and so do you, let's not pretend it's because of the gravity of the issue. It's because I am a national figure and anything like this will be written a lot about now, so let's not pretend this is some grave thing."
  • Christie signaled in New Hampshire he's intent on pressing Clinton, the Democratic frontrunner in the 2016 presidential race, on the attacks in Benghazi, Libya that's been a lighting rod for Clinton critics just as the governor declared during a recent trip here that he's done "apologizing" for the Bridgegate scandal
  • "I don't think there's been nearly enough questions asked about this," Christie said. "We need to ask a lot more questions about Benghazi. We need to get to the bottom of what happened because it does matter, madam secretary."
grayton downing

Lost in Translation | The Scientist Magazine® - 0 views

www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/36561/title/Lost-in-Translation/

scientist translation bias research

shared by grayton downing on 22 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • excessive reporting of positive results in papers that describe animal testing of potential therapies, just like the publishing bias seen in clinical research, according to a paper published today
  • We know publication bias happens a lot in clinical trials,” said Torgerson, “so I was surprised at myself for being surprised at the results, because of course, if it happens in human research, why wouldn’t it happen in animal research?”
  • his suspicions about publication bias by performing a statistical meta-analysis of thousands of reported animal tests for various neurological interventions—a total of 4,445 reported tests of 160 different drugs and other treatments for conditions that included Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, brain ischemia, and more.
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  • One, as mentioned, is the suppression of negative results. The second is selective reporting of only the statistical analyses of data that provide a significant score. “Practically any data set, if it is tortured enough, will confess, and you will get a statistically significant result,”
  • , a publication bias “almost certainly” applies in other areas of preclinical research,
  • he suggested that a forum where investigators can deposit neutral or negative results in the form of articles, should be established to ensure that such findings are in the public arena and not hidden. This should help prevent other researchers from pursuing fruitless avenues of research, he said, “which is a waste of animals and a waste of research money.” Not to mention a risk to people enrolled in potentially pointless trials.
Javier E

When bias beats logic: why the US can't have a reasoned gun debate | US news | The Guar... - 1 views

www.theguardian.com/...us-gun-control-debate-bias

guns debate culture crisis politics nuance discourse polarization logic bias

shared by Javier E on 08 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • Jon Stokes, a writer and software developer, said he is frustrated after each mass shooting by “the sentiment among very smart people, who are used to detail and nuance and doing a lot of research, that this is cut and dried, this is black and white”.
  • Stokes has lived on both sides of America’s gun culture war, growing up in rural Louisiana, where he got his first gun at age nine, and later studying at Harvard and the University of Chicago, where he adopted some of a big-city resident’s skepticism about guns. He’s written articles about the gun geek culture behind the popularity of the AR-15, why he owns a military-style rifle, and why gun owners are so skeptical of tech-enhanced “smart guns”.
  • Even to suggest that the debate is more complicated – that learning something about guns, by taking a course on how to safely carry a concealed weapon, or learning how to fire a gun, might shift their perspective on whichever solution they have just heard about on TV – “just upsets them, and they basically say you’re trying to obscure the issue”.
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  • In early 2013, a few months after the mass shooting at Sandy Hook elementary school, a Yale psychologist created an experiment to test how political bias affects our reasoning skills. Dan Kahan was attempting to understand why public debates over social problems remain deadlocked, even when good scientific evidence is available. He decided to test a question about gun control.
  • Then Kahan ran the same test again. This time, instead of evaluating skin cream trials, participants were asked to evaluate whether a law banning citizens from carrying concealed firearms in public made crime go up or down. The result: when liberals and conservatives were confronted with a set of results that contradicted their political assumptions, the smartest people were barely more likely to arrive at the correct answer than the people with no math skills at all. Political bias had erased the advantages of stronger reasoning skills.
  • The reason that measurable facts were sidelined in political debates was not that people have poor reasoning skills, Kahan concluded. Presented with a conflict between holding to their beliefs or finding the correct answer to a problem, people simply went with their tribe.
  • It wasa reasonable strategy on the individual level – and a “disastrous” one for tackling social change, he concluded.
  • But the biggest distortion in the gun control debate is the dramatic empathy gap between different kinds of victims. It’s striking how puritanical the American imagination is, how narrow its range of sympathy. Mass shootings, in which the perpetrator kills complete strangers at random in a public place, prompt an outpouring of grief for the innocent lives lost. These shootings are undoubtedly horrifying, but they account for a tiny percentage of America’s overall gun deaths each year.
  • The roughly 60 gun suicides each day, the 19 black men and boys lost each day to homicide, do not inspire the same reaction, even though they represent the majority of gun violence victims. Yet there are meaningful measures which could save lives here – targeted inventions by frontline workers in neighborhoods where the gun homicide rate is 400 times higher than other developed countries, awareness campaigns to help gun owners in rural states learn about how to identify suicide risk and intervene with friends in trouble.
  • When it comes to suicide, “there is so much shame about that conversation … and where there is shame there is also denial,”
  • When young men of color are killed, “you have disdain and aggression,” fueled by the type of white supremacist argument which equates blackness with criminality.
katedriscoll

Cognitive Bias: Understanding How It Affects Your Decisions - 0 views

www.healthline.com/...cognitive-bias

shared by katedriscoll on 28 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • A cognitive bias is a flaw in your reasoning that leads you to misinterpret information from the world around you and to come to an inaccurate conclusion. Because you are flooded with information from millions of sources throughout the day, your brain develops ranking systems to decide which information deserves your attention and which information is important enough to store in memory. It also creates shortcuts meant to cut down on the time it takes for you to process information. The problem is that the shortcuts and ranking systems aren’t always perfectly objective because their architecture is uniquely adapted to your life experiences
  • Anchoring bias is the tendency to rely heavily on the first information you learn when you are evaluating something. In other words, what you learn early in an investigation often has a greater impact on your judgment than information you learn later. In one study, for example, researchers gave two groups of study participants some written background information about a person in a photograph. Then they asked them to describe how they thought the people in the photos were feeling. People who read more negative background information tended to infer more negative feelings, and people who read positive background information tended to infer more positive feelings. Their first impressions heavily influenced their ability to infer emotions in others.
  • Another common bias is the tendency to give greater credence to ideas that come to mind easily. If you can immediately think of several facts that support a judgment, you may be inclined to think that judgment is correct. For example, if a person sees multiple headlines about shark attacks in a coastal area, that person might form a belief that the risk of shark attacks is higher than it is.The American Psychological Association points out that when information is readily available around you, you’re more likely to remember it. Information that is easy to access in your memory seems more reliable.
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