4.3.2: Personal Biases

Everyone, including scholars and journalists, has personal or cognitive biases. Biases are attitudes, assumptions, or stereotypes that affect how we engage with the world, from our perceptions, to decisions and actions. Examining our own biases is an important part of thinking critically about information and how we engage with it.

Explicit vs. Implicit Bias

Some of our personal biases or prejudices are explicit, meaning that we are consciously aware of them. For example, if you think cats are better than dogs, and you aware of thinking it, you have an explicit bias in favor of cats. Extreme examples of explicit bias include consciously holding racist, homophobic, or xenophobic beliefs.

Implicit biases are a type of cognitive bias that we are not aware of, but that still affect how we think and behave. Project Implicit, created by researchers at University of Washington, Harvard University, and University of Virginia, studies implicit bias and helps people understand how our unconscious thinking affects our behavior. If you want to test your own implicit biases regarding particular race, gender, sexual orientation, disability, exercise, anxiety, alcohol, eating, artificial intelligence, and more, you can take Project Implicit's tests online.

Types of Cognitive Bias

Social scientists have identified dozens of cognitive biases. Below are some examples that affect how we think about and evaluate the information we encounter:

• Illusory Truth Effect
  The illusory truth effect is the tendency to believe things that are easy to process, or that have been repeated multiple times, regardless of whether or not they are actually accurate. For example, if you have repeatedly heard that vitamin C prevents the common cold, you might believe that it does, even though there is no evidence that it does. The illusory truth effect occurs even when people know better. One study found that people demonstrated “knowledge neglect,” meaning that they failed to rely on their prior knowledge in favor of the false information they repeatedly encountered (Fazio et al, 2015).
• WYSIATI (What You See Is All There Is)
  The WYSIATI bias leads to making decisions based on what is known while ignoring the existence of what is unknown, or assuming that what is unknown doesn't exist in the first place. For example, if you assume that your Google search results are representative of all of the information on a topic and you don't think critically about what might be missing, you are exhibiting WYSIATI bias.
• Confirmation Bias
  Confirmation bias is the tendency to seek, notice, retain, and use information that supports or confirms your pre-existing views and beliefs, and/or to (mis)interpret information as confirming those views and beliefs even when it does not. For example, if you believe that a particular dietary supplement will make you live longer, you might overlook or misinterpret research studies demonstrating that these claims are false.
• Availability Cascade
  The availability cascade is the tendency to favor information that you remember easily over more reliable information that is less easily remembered.
• Communal Reinforcement
  Communal reinforcement bias is the perpetuation of beliefs, concepts, or ideas within a group, regardless of the existence of empirical evidence supporting them. For example, if your roommate believes that your apartment is haunted, you and your friends start sharing this belief with other people in the neighborhood, you are likely to continue reinforcing the belief in each other until people begin to see it as a fact.
• Ingroup Bias
  Ingroup bias is the tendency for people to trust, believe, or favor members of their own group.
• Dunning-Kruger Effect
  The Dunning-Kruger Effect is the tendency for those with low ability in something to overestimate their ability and fail to recognize their lack of ability. For example, someone who plays the guitar badly might overestimate their performance on the guitar.
• Bias Blind Spot
  Bias blind spot is the tendency to recognize more cognitive biases in other people than in ourselves, and/or to see ourselves as less biased than others.

Challenging Our Biases

In the video below, weather and climate expert Dr. J. Marshall Shepherd describes how we can use knowledge to counter confirmation bias, the Dunning-Kruger effect, and cognitive dissonance.

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Sources

Fazio, L.K., Brashier, N.M., Payne, B.K. & Marsh, E.J. (2015). Knowledge does not protect against illusory truth. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 144(5), 993–1002. doi.org/10.1037/xge0000098