Quotes About Bias

In forming a judgment, lay your hearts void of foretaken opinions; else, whatsoever is done or said, will be measured by a wrong rule; like them who have jaundice, to whom everything appears yellow.

We see what we want to see, after all, especially when blinded by physical attraction.

She'd read somewhere that you only truly saw what someone looked like in the first few minutes of meeting them, that after then it was only an impression, coloured by what you thought of them.

assertions about men: sleazy, chancing, self-serving, porn-obsessed slackers.

She'd read somewhere that you only truly saw what someone looked like in the first few minutes of meeting them, that after then it was only an impression, coloured by what you thought of them. It

look at other people and ask yourself if you are really seeing them or just your thoughts about them.... Without knowing it, we are coloring everything, putting our spin on it all.

Would we find that our history books covered things a little differently than the way they actually happened?

Often, what we think are the facts of the past are in reality simply reflections of what we want to believe about the present.

Obama was willing to compromise and Republicans were not. That's not a biased statement. One of my problems with the limitations of journalism is that straightforward descriptions of reality are seen as being biased.

Objectivity is just male subjectivity.

If you think that moral reasoning is something we do to figure out the truth, you'll be constantly frustrated by how foolish, biased, and illogical people become when they disagree with you. But if you think about moral reasoning as a skill we humans evolved to further our social agendas—to justify our own actions and to defend the teams we belong to—then things will make a lot more sense.

skilled arguers Ã¢â'¬Â¦ are not after the truth but after arguments supporting their views.

Both the physical and the electronic isolation from people we disagree with allow the forces of confirmation bias, groupthink, and tribalism to push us still further apart.

If thinking is confirmatory rather than exploratory in these dry and easy cases, then what chance is there that people will think in an open-minded, exploratory way when self-interest, social identity, and strong emotions make them want or even need to reach a preordained conclusion? 3. WE LIE, CHEAT, AND JUSTIFY SO WELL THAT WE HONESTLY BELIEVE WE ARE HONEST

A great deal of research in social psychology shows that people are warmer and more trusting toward people who look like them, dress like them, talk like them, or even just share their first name or birthday.

Studies show that intergroup competition increases love of the in-group far more than it increases dislike of the out-group.

Moderates and conservatives were most accurate in their predictions, whether they are pretending to be liberals or conservatives. Liberals were the least accurate.

As Epley and Dunning had found, people really are open to information that will predict the behavior of others, but they refuse to adjust their self-assessments.

Ignorant people see everything in black and white—they rely heavily on the myth of pure evil—and they are strongly influenced by their own self-interest.

We circle around sacred values and then share post hoc arguments about why we are so right and they are so wrong. We think the other side is blind to truth, reason, science, and common sense, but in fact everyone goes blind when talking about their sacred objects.

If you know what your mind is up to, and why you so easily see the world through a distorting lens of good and evil, you can take steps to reduce your self-righteousness. You can thereby reduce the frequency of conflicts with others who are equally convinced of their righteousness.

naive realism": Each of us thinks we see the world directly, as it really is. We further believe that the facts as we see them are there for all to see, therefore others should agree with us. If they don't agree, it follows either that they have not yet been exposed to the relevant facts or else that they are blinded by their interests and ideologies.

Exploratory thought is an "evenhanded consideration of alternative points of view." Confirmatory thought is "a one-sided attempt to rationalize a particular point of view.

When all three conditions apply, people do their darnedest to figure out the truth, because that's what the audience wants to hear. But the rest of the time—which is almost all of the time—accountability pressures simply increase confirmatory thought. People are trying harder to look right than to be right.