Quotes About Bias

We've come to understand over the past hundred years that information is colored with subjectivity: What we know depends on how we interpret our information base.

Kincaid, there's a reason why stereotypes become stereotypes. It's because they're true. - Harold Sacks

with a bias toward individualism that affects our conceptualization of the social. Smelser (1997: 29) says: "We live in the Western cultural tradition, which has exploited the cultural values of individualism. As children of that tradition, we are most comfortable taking the individual person as the starting point of analysis. Put another way, that cultural tradition 'tilts' us toward assuming that the natural unit for the behavioral and social sciences is the individual.

ethnocentrism—the tendency to evaluate the customs of other groups according to one's own cultural standards.

We have all heard what we wanted to hear! Truth that sounds right to our ears!

She [Mrs. Hines] stood before the door as if she were barring them from the house--a dumpy, fat little woman with a round face like dirty and unovened dough, and a tight screw of scant hair.

I am astonished at the ease with which uninformed persons come to a settled, a passionate opinion when they have no grounds for judgment.

Prejudice is the child of ignorance.

The history of philosophy is, to a great extent, that of a certain clash of human temperaments…Of whatever temperament a philosopher is, he tries, when philosophizing, to sink the fact of his temperament…Yet his temperament really gives him a stronger bias than any of his more strictly objective premises.

Our environment encourages us not to be philosophers but partisans.

but hate rarely looks at the truth.

When people have the opportunity to collect information from the world, they are more likely to select information that supports their preexisting attitudes, beliefs, and actions.

Confirmation bias is probably the single biggest problem in business, because even the most sophisticated people get it wrong. People go out and they're collecting the data, and they don't realize they're cooking the books.

This doesn't make sense. The doctors were acting as though having more medication options somehow made medication a worse bet than surgery. But if 47 percent of doctors thought medication A was preferable to surgery, the mere existence of a second medication shouldn't have tipped them toward surgery.

You encounter a choice. But narrow framing makes you miss options. • You analyze your options. But the confirmation bias leads you to gather self-serving information. • You make a choice. But short-term emotion will often tempt you to make the wrong one. • Then you live with it. But you'll often be overconfident about how the future will unfold.

Not cocky overconfidence that comes from collecting biased information and ignoring uncertainties, but the real confidence that comes from knowing you've made the best decision that you could.

we are quick to jump to conclusions because we give too much weight to the information that's right in front of us, while failing to consider the information that's just offstage. He called this tendency "what you see is all there is.

34% of White applicants and 14% of Black applicants without records received callbacks, compared to 17% and 5% with records.

One rule of thumb is to keep searching for options until you fall in love at least twice. If you've only identified one good candidate for a job, for instance, you'll have the strong urge to talk yourself into hiring her, which is a recipe for the confirmation bias.

One rule of thumb is to keep searching for options until you fall in love at least twice. If you've only identified one good candidate for a job, for instance, you'll have the strong urge to talk yourself into hiring her, which is a recipe for the confirmation bias. You'll start to make excuses for the flaws you see: She asked us not to call her old boss for a reference, but that's probably okay, because the boss sounded like a real jerk …

Confirmation bias = hunting for information that confirms our initial assumptions (which are often self-serving).

Kahneman says that we are quick to jump to conclusions because we give too much weight to the information that's right in front of us, while failing to consider the information that's just offstage. He called this tendency "what you see is all there is.

Compounding this preference for the status quo is another bias called loss aversion, which says that we find losses more painful than gains are pleasant.

Kahneman says that we are quick to jump to conclusions because we give too much weight to the information that's right in front of us, while failing to consider the information that's just offstage.