Quotes About Bias

The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion (either as being the received opinion or as being agreeable to itself) draws all things else to support and agree with it. And though there be a greater number and weight of instances to be found on the other side, yet these it either neglects and despises, or else by some distinction sets aside and rejects, in order that by this great and pernicious predetermination the authority of its former conclusions may remain inviolate.

Once the human mind has favoured certain views, it pulls everything else into agreement with and support for them. Should they be outweighed by more powerful countervailing considerations, it either fails to notice these, or scorns them, or makes fine distinctions in order to neutralize and so reject them.

There are four classes of Idols which beset men's minds. To these for distinction's sake I have assigned names, calling the first class Idols of the Tribe; the second, Idols of the Cave; the third, Idols of the Market Place; the fourth, Idols of the Theater.

Human beings... are far too prone to generalize from one instance. The technical word for this, interestingly enough, is superstition.

no man is a good judge in his own case.

Opinions founded on prejudice are always sustained with the greatest of violence.

We rarely think people have good sense unless they agree with us.

We think very few people sensible, except those who are of our opinion.

As the US Justice Department explains in their report on the Ferguson PD, "the lower rate at which officers find contraband when searching African-Americans indicates either that officers' suspicion of criminal wrongdoing is less likely to be accurate when interacting with African-Americans or that officers are more likely to search African-Americans without any suspicion of criminal wrongdoing. Either explanation suggest bias, whether explicit or implicit" (US DOJ 2015, 65).

The fact that Hispanic drivers are less likely to have contraband does not seem to stop officers from searching them much more than white drivers.

Let's hope she's like the others, who look only at the surface. Let's hope she'd never think that a girl with black-velvet eyes and cut-glass cheekbones could be a witch.

That's another thing about the emotions: they make us take sides.

Neuroimaging studies indicate that imitating people of one's own gender activates reward centers in the brain, whereas imitating people of the opposite gender does not. This doesn't necessarily mean that the brain is in charge, because it too reacts to the environment. But it does suggest that evolution has equipped our young with a feel-good bias to conform to their gender.

Why are we so hesitant about working in diverse teams? The reason is at least in part a function of human nature. Humans have a tendency to stick with people who are like themselves and avoid those who are different. Psychologists have a name for this tendency. They call it the similar-attraction effect.

Listening with your body, participating in the context, is so powerful precisely because it removes one of the greatest tools of listening and the greatest potential for bias: the question. Often, as we're articulating the questions we ask in field research, the patterns we think we'll see or the patterns we'd like to see start to get embedded in the question. In these cases, the question can become the enemy of the truth.

We fixate on what is relevant to us, and we see what we want to see.

Stupid as a man, say the women: cowardly as a woman, say the men. Stupidity in a woman is unwomanly.

Men rarely see their own actions as unjustified.

Sometimes we find it hardest to accept in others that which we cling to in ourselves.

With boys there was a fundamental assumption that they had a right to be there—not always, but more often than not. With girls, Why her? came up so quickly.

Harvard College was probably less hurtful than any other university then in existence. It taught little, and that little ill, but it left the mind open, free from bias, ignorant of facts, but docile.

Ah his idea was simply what a man's idea always is—to put every effort off on the woman.

You and I do not see things as they are. We see things as we are.

So this guy, Jeff Johnson, who is an accountant who cares nothing at all about a free press and cares nothing about journalism, he's a right winger who supported the war, you know, who two years ago told people he couldn't stand a word that I wrote.