Quotes About Bias

Psychologists call this natural tendency to be selective in both our memory and our perception confirmation bias. People with strong convictions often take confirmation bias to a level known as motivated reasoning. The more evidence one presents against their belief, the more motivated they become to refute the evidence and defend their conviction.

Understand: people will tend to judge you based on your outward appearance. If you are not careful and simply assume that it is best to be yourself, they will begin to ascribe to you all kinds of qualities that have little to do with who you are but correspond to what they want to see.

The greatest danger you face is your general assumption that you really understand people and that you can quickly judge them. Instead, you must begin with the assumption that you are ignorant and that you have natural biases that will make you judge people incorrectly. Each person you meet is like an undiscovered country, with a very particular psychological chemistry that you will carefully explore.

Treating everyone equally means ignoring their differences, elevating the less skillful and suppressing those who excel.

you must begin with the assumption that you are ignorant and that you have natural biases that will make you judge people incorrectly.

To hold an idea and convince ourselves we arrived at it rationally, we go in search of evidence to support our view. What could be more objective or scientific? But because of the pleasure principle and its unconscious influence, we manage to find the evidence that confirms what we want to believe. This is known as confirmation bias.

Appearance Bias I understand the people I deal with; I see them just as they are. We see people not as they are, but as they appear to us. And these appearances are usually misleading.

The Blame Bias I learn from my experience and mistakes. Mistakes and failures elicit the need to explain. We want to learn the lesson and not repeat the experience. But in truth, we do not like to look too closely at what we did; our introspection is limited. Our natural response is to blame others, circumstances, or a momentary lapse of judgment. The reason for this bias is that it is often too painful to look at our mistakes.

After all, one wouldn't want facts and reality—not to mention the national interest—to intrude upon partisan politics, would one?

There's also subliminal cuing about beauty.18 From an early age, in both sexes and across cultures, attractive people are judged to be smarter, kinder, and more honest. We're more likely to vote for attractive people or hire them, less likely to convict them of crimes, and, if they are convicted, more likely to dole out shorter sentences.

In general, our morally tinged cultural institutions—religion, nationalism, ethnic pride, team spirit—bias us toward our best behaviors when we are single shepherds facing a potential tragedy of the commons. They make us less selfish in Me versus Us situations. But they send us hurtling toward our worst behaviors when confronting Thems and their different moralities.

The depths of human conformity and obedience are shown by the speed with which they occur—it takes less than 200 milliseconds for your brain to register that the group has picked a different answer from yours, and less than 380 milliseconds for a profile of activation that predicts changing your opinion. Our brains are biased to get along by going along in less than a second.

With chronic stress the nucleus accumbens is depleted of dopamine, biasing rats toward social subordination and biasing humans toward depression.

US/THEM-ING TYPICALLY involves inflating the merits of Us concerning core values—we are more correct, wise, moral, and worthy when it comes to knowing what the gods want/running the economy/raising kids/fighting this war. Us-ness also involves inflating the merits of our arbitrary markers, and that can take some work—rationalizing why our food is tastier, our music more moving, our language more logical or poetic.

Words unconsciously shift thoughts and feelings. One person's 'terrorist' is another's 'freedom fighter'; politicians jockey to commandeer 'family values,' and somehow you can't favor both 'choice' and 'life'.

In the E and S quadrants, discrimination does exist, especially in companies. Your looks, your education, your skin color, and your gender all count on the left side.

Being an intellectual, he thought that salespeople were below him.

People who don't like cats always seem to think that there is some peculiar virtue in not liking them.

Well, we're not getting a girl," said Marilla, as if poisoning wells were a purely feminine accomplishment and not to be dreaded in the case of a boy.

Life is not a beauty contest, some ugly people are great. What I hate is nasty, ugly people... The worst is ugly, short men. Women can be short, but for men it is impossible. It is something that they will not forgive in life... they are mean and they want to kill you.

Growing up in this town, I had long ago learned that the savagery of a man named Mohammed was rarely questioned, but his humanity always had to be proven.

If Fred's history will seem less unbiased then some would wish, let it never be overlooked that it is no small task to record a history of hate when one is among the hated.

We have our opinion and we filter information into a paradigm that supports it.

The simple truth is that the truth does not exist, it all depends on a persons point of view.