Quotes About Bias

We all have a tendency to think that the world must conform to our prejudices. The opposite view involves some effort of thought, and most people would die sooner than think – in fact they do so." The ABC of Relativity [1925]

myself. We constantly portray and judge people only in false terms, we judge them unjustly and portray them meanly, I said to myself, in every instance, no matter how we portray, no matter how we judge them. Such

For desired conclusions, we ask ourselves, Can I believe this?, but for unpalatable conclusions we ask, Must I believe this?

Perhaps the most general and most important mental habit to instill is an appreciation of the folly of trying to draw conclusions from incomplete and unrepresentative evidence. An essential corollary of this appreciation should be an awareness of how often our everyday experience presents us with biased samples of information.

We must recognize that our view of the world is just that - a view that has been shaped by our own vantage point, history, and idiosyncratic knowledge.

We tend to resolve our perplexity arising out of the experience that other people see the world differently than we see it ourselves by declaring that these others, in consequence of some basic intellectual and moral defect, are unable to see things "as they really are" and to react to them "in a normal way." We thus imply, of course, that things are in fact as we see them, and that our ways are the normal ways. (Ichheiser, 1949, p. 39)

Finally, it has been shown that the tendency for people to think of themselves as above average is reduced—even for ambiguous traits—when people are required to use specific definitions of each trait in their judgments.27

The pair of legs that carried him were rickety, and there was a bias in his gait which inclined him somewhat to the left of a straight line.

The fact is, said d'Urberville, drily; whatever your dear husband believed you accept, and whatever he rejected you reject, without the least inquiry or reasoning on your part. That's just like you women. Your mind is enslaved to his.

we commit honest maniacs to Bedlam, so judges should be withdrawn from their bench, whose erroneous biases are leading us to dissolution.

Inborn in almost every artistic nature is a luxuriant, treacherous bias in favor of the injustice that creates beauty, a tendency to sympathize with aristocratic preference and pay it homage. A

People read what news they wanted to and each accordingly built his own rathouse of history's rags and straws.

The New York Times' long-standing motto, "All the News That's Fit to Print" should be changed to reflect today's reality: "Manufacturing News to Fit an Ideology.

Various mental tests or scholastic tests have been criticized as unfair because different groups perform very differently on such tests. But one reply to critics summarized the issue succinctly: "The tests are not unfair. Life is unfair and the tests measure the results.

Have you gone crazy, Lefty?" "No. On the contrary, I have become educated." "Sometimes that's worse, these days.

In short, numbers are accepted as evidence when they agree with preconceptions, but not when they don't.

One of the most central—and most controversial—premises of the civil rights vision is that statistical disparities in incomes, occupations, education, etc., represent moral inequities, and are caused by "society.

Even when "both sides" are presented in the media, seldom are the reasons for each side presented.

Filtering out discordant facts in the media and refusing to release raw data on which some favored conclusion has been reached—whether about the supposed success of affirmative action in college admissions or the conclusiveness of the case for catastrophic global warming—are all part of the pattern of preempting issues rather than confronting them.

History is not what happened but what is written down

History is not what happened. History is what was written down.

In the early 2000s, researchers in Chicago and Boston mailed out fake résumés to hundreds of employers, varying only the names of the applicants, but choosing names that would be seen as identifiably black or white. Strikingly, "Emily" and "Brendan" were 50 percent more likely to get called for an interview than "Lakisha" and "Jamal.

Even the researcher was surprised by what she found: the white applicant with a felony conviction was more likely to get a positive response from a prospective employer than the black applicant with no criminal record. When the study was replicated in New York City a few years later, she and her colleagues saw similar results for Latino applicants relative to whites.

I try to be open-minded, to judge each individual on merit and accomplishment. I hold no bias against any belief system, sexual orientation, or skin color that differs from mine. I do not hate in stereotype.