Quotes About Bias

Critical thinking requires assembling data to back up one's opinion. Otherwise students may falsely conclude that all opinions are somehow equal.

It is a difficult thing for a white man to learn what a colored man really thinks; because, generally, with the latter an additional and different light must be brought to bear on what he thinks; and his thoughts are often influenced by considerations so delicate and subtle that it would be impossible for him to confess or explain them to one of the opposite race.

Men are trained to discount women in any number of ways, Lydia.

But now they would believe Hamid was responsible for the death of Mamie. It suited the stories they told themselves about the dark-skinned man, the foreigner, the outsider, the Muslim.

Black solidarity is so taken for granted in America that almost no one ever points out that what is entirely acceptable for blacks would be considered hopelessly racist if done by whites.

Blacks now demand special treatment as a matter of course. In its befuddled way, society is trying to do what is right. But to favor blacks systematically and then call this sorry charade "equal opportunity" is self-delusion of the worst kind.

What started out as compensation for black slavery and segregation has become automatic preference for any nonwhite and an automatic handicap for any white.

When blacks vote overwhelmingly for a black candidate, they are only exercising their civil rights. When whites vote for the white opponent, they are racist.

This result is fascinating because it shows that children as young as 10 feel the need to try to avoid appearing prejudiced, even if doing so leads them to perform poorly on a basic cognitive test

Nor is there the same pressure on blacks when they talk insultingly about whites.

An unwillingness to associate with blacks has long been considered a sign of lower-class closed-mindedness, but a 2006 study by Michael Emerson and David Sikkink of Rice University found that the more education white parents had, the more likely they were to rule out schools for their children simply because of the number of blacks.

She interpreted this to mean that white subjects were struggling with the "awkwardness" or "exhaustion" of dealing with a black man, and that this interfered with their ability to take the mental test.

One of my favorite CEOs reminds me often that "memories are convenient." What he means is we more readily remember events that prove we're right.

Ninety-three percent of American motorists believe they are better-than-average drivers. In a 2007 BusinessWeek poll, 90 percent of the managers surveyed believed their performance in the workplace to be in the top 10 percent.4

The Truth Assumption As we argue vociferously for our view, we often fail to question one crucial assumption upon which our whole stance in the conversation is built: I am right, you are wrong. This simple assumption causes endless grief.

The error we make in the realm of intentions is simple but profound : we assume we know the intentions of others when we don't. Worse still, when we are unsure about someone's intentions, we too often decide they are bad.

As you approach these chapters, have this question marinating in the back of your mind: Why is it that when we give feedback we so often feel right, yet when we receive feedback it so often feels wrong?

Our Conclusions Reflect Self-Interest

It seemed that the media pretty much controlled how the average person perceived the situation. We had little respect for journalists. Throughout my career, reporters always seemed to invent what they did not know and misinterpret what they saw.

women never learn to dispense with the sentimental motive in their judgments of men.

the facts of history never come to us pure, since they do not and cannot exist in a pure form: they are always refracted through the mind of the recorder. It follows that when we take up a work of history, our first concern should not be with the facts which it contains but with the historian who wrote it.

And he would have been most surprised if anyone had told him he was prejudiced, it being the nature of a prejudice that those who possess it have no idea that it is prejudice at all.

propio del prejuicio es que aquel que lo tiene no es consciente de ello en absoluto.

Still others worry that news organizations may pull their punches when reporting about the activities of their corporate parents or partners. Will ABC News go easy on problems at Disney, for example, which owns ABC?