Quotes About Bias

By its very nature, history is always a one-sided account.

Football Players Are Really Dumb

The bias is often subtle, or even subconscious. People at HubSpot rarely talk about age bias, and when they do, they're not talking about older workers being treated poorly. They're talking about how unfair it is that people in their early twenties are not given enough responsibility, just because they're young.

Thinking about the good things that happened to you sets up your dreams to be more positive, which will help you sleep better, enhance your mood, boost your energy levels, and put a smile on your face. When you fall asleep happier, you wake up happier, ready to embrace the day with a positive bias.

When we imagine future circumstances, we fill in details that won't really come to pass and leave out details that will. When we imagine future feelings, we find it impossible to ignore what we are feeling now and impossible to recognize how we will think about the things that happen later.

Most of us appear to believe that we are more athletic, intelligent, organized, ethical, logical, interesting, open-minded, and healthy-not to mention more attractive-than the average person.

In short, we derive support for our preferred conclusions by listening to the words that we put in the mouths of people who have already been preselected for their willingness to say what we want to hear.

power leads individuals to anchor too heavily on their own vantage point, insufficiently adjusting to others' perspective.

the prefrontal cortex has a novelty bias, meaning that its attention can be easily hijacked by something new—the proverbial shiny objects we use to entice infants, puppies, and kittens.

This has to be what we teach our children: how to evaluate the hordes of information that are out there, to discern what is true and what is not, to identify biases and half-truths, and to know how to be critical, independent thinkers.

We make a number of reasoning errors due to cognitive biases.

Experts who acknowledge the full extent of their ignorance may expect to be replaced by more confident competitors, who are better able to gain the trust of clients. An unbiased appreciation of uncertainty is a cornerstone of rationality—but it is not what people and organizations want.

when people believe a conclusion is true, they are also very likely to believe arguments that appear to support it, even when these arguments are unsound.

The worse the consequence, the greater the hindsight bias.

I call it theory-induced blindness: once you have accepted a theory and used it as a tool in your thinking, it is extraordinarily difficult to notice its flaws. If you come upon an observation that does not seem to fit the model, you assume that there must be a perfectly good explanation that you are somehow missing.

The world in our heads is not a precise replica of reality; our expectations about the frequency of events are distorted by the prevalence and emotional intensity of the messages to which we are exposed.

If a satisfactory answer to a hard question is not found quickly, System 1 will find a related question that is easier and will answer it. I call the operation of answering one question in place of another substitution.

You have no compelling moral intuitions to guide you in solving that problem. Your moral feelings are attached to frames, to descriptions of reality rather than to reality itself.

Jumping to conclusions is a safer sport in the world of our imagination than it is in reality.

To understand error in judgment, we must understand both bias and noise.

wherever there is judgment, there is noise—and more of it than you think.

You like or dislike people long before you know much about them; you trust or distrust strangers without knowing why; you feel that an enterprise is bound to succeed without analyzing it. Whether you state them or not, you often have answers to questions that you do not completely understand, relying on evidence that you can neither explain nor defend.

How do people make the judgments and how do they assign decision weights? We start from two simple answers, then qualify them. Here are the oversimplified answers: People overestimate the probabilities of unlikely events. People overweight unlikely events in their decisions.

Amos and I introduced the idea of a conjunction fallacy, which people commit when they judge a conjunction of two events (here, bank teller and feminist) to be more probable than one of the events (bank teller) in a direct comparison.