Cognitive bias

“ The bias as a whole, however, is a very complicated affair which in the main is a product, not of suppression, but of fusion, a fusion between trends of certain lines of thought and conduct which may or may not be determined by unconscious experience, together with other influences, such as those of parents, teachers and friends, which have never been either suppressed or repressed, but very much the opposite. ”

“ By seeing the bias and prejudices of others marked in a strong and decided manner, we are led to detect our own—from laughing at their absurdities we begin to suspect the soundness of our own conclusions, which we find to be just the reverse of them. ”

“ Of the tendency to particular pursuits,--to art, science, or any particular course of life,--we do not speak; the bias we allude to is in the more personal disposition of the man,--in that which gives a tone to his internal character; nor is it material of what proportions compounded, of the affections, or the intellect, or the senses,--whether of some only, or the whole; that these form the ground of every man's bias is no less certain, than the fact that there is scarcely any secret which men are in the habit of guarding with such sedulous care. ”

“ But if the bias given to the mind, by a particular study, totally unfits it for others, is it probable that there is something in the nature of those studies which requires a particular bias and structure of the faculties to excel in them, from the very first? If genius were, as some pretend, the mere exercise of general power on a particular subject, without any difference of organs or subordinate faculties, a man would improve equally in every thing, and grow wise at all points. ”

“ This summary is comprehensive enough to indicate the character and point to some of the causes of individual aberrations of judgment; [Pg 793] that it does no more than this is due to the simple fact that the personal bias is as varied as humanity itself, and that the deflecting impulses in any given case are to be referred to a complex of factors almost eluding analysis. ”

“ But there is a strong bias, a sort of labour-saving bias, in the normal human mind, to ignore this, and not only to speak but to think of a thousand bricks or a thousand sheep or a thousand Chinamen as though they were all absolutely true to sample. If it is brought before a thinker for a moment that in any special case this is not so, he slips back to the old attitude as soon as his attention is withdrawn. ”

“ According to the Reply, it must be a mistake to suppose that there is anywhere in the world such a thing as bias, or prejudice, or prepossession: they are words without meaning in regard to our judgments, for even if they could raise a clamor from without, the intellect sits within, in an atmosphere of serenity, and, like Justice, is deaf and blind, as well as calm. ”

“ It is extremely rare to find men, who, to an enlarged mind, extensive knowledge, great talents, join either a well regulated imagination, or the courage necessary to successfully oppugn habitual errors; triumphantly to attack those chimerical systems, with which the brain has been inoculated from the first hour of its birth. A secret bias, an invincible inclination, frequently, in despite of all reasoning, re-conducts the most comprehensive, the best fortified, the most liberal minds, to those prejudices which have a wide-spreading establishment ”

“ Those persons who start with a certain bias of mind in one direction seldom notice any facts that would throw out of joint those previously amassed; they instinctively collect the ones that 'match,' all others having a tendency to disturb the harmony of the original scheme. ”

“ We should expect from all this that in the act of introspection the mind is apt, within certain limits, to find what it is prepared to find. And since there is in these acts often a distinct wish to detect some particular feeling, we can see how easy it must be for a man through bias and a wrong focussing of the attention to deceive himself up to a certain point with respect to the actual contents of his mind. ”

“ The bias resulting from these prejudices is so strong that often, even when we are fighting against a principle which our mind thinks false, which is repugnant to our reason, and which our conscience disapproves, we defend it without knowing it, we reason in accordance with it, and we obey it while attacking it. ”

“ This bias works in all men. While there is life, there is pressure from within on belief, tending to push reason aside. The force of the pressure, of course, varies with individual temperament, age, and other circumstances. ”

“ Now you will surely judge that so to reject the discussion of literature must evidence stubborness, a very special obtuseness against objections, or, as the kindly colloquialisms of science have it, "a complete personal bias." ”

“ The bias which decides his choice between two or more motives may come from some unsuspected ancestral source, of which he knows nothing at all. He is automatic in virtue of that hidden spring of reflex action, all the time having the feeling that he is self-determining. ”

“ There is, very generally, a lack of intellectual faculty sufficiently complex and plastic to comprehend the involved and changing phenomena of society. The scientific judgment is disturbed by a variety of emotional prejudices, which Mr. Spencer classifies as the educational bias, the bias of patriotism, the class bias, the political bias, and the theological bias. ”

“ And first, let us contemplate a common fallacy in men's opinions about human affairs, which pervades the several fallacies fostered by the political bias.
Results are proportionate to appliances—see here the tacit assumption underlying many errors in the conduct of life, private and public. In private life every one discovers the untruth of this assumption, and yet continues to act as though he had not discovered its untruth. ”

“ But though the opinions of the generality of mankind, when not dependent on mere habit and inculcation, have their root much more in the inclinations than in the intellect, it is a necessary condition to the triumph of the moral bias that it should first pervert the understanding. Every erroneous inference, though originating in moral causes, involves the intellectual operation of admitting insufficient evidence as sufficient ”

“ And that they are habitually swayed by these antagonistic interests, is notorious. So strong is the bias, as sometimes even to destroy the power of seeing from any other than the professional stand-point. ”

“ It unfortunately happens, that, where people are deeply interested in a subject, they form their opinion before they begin to examine and investigate, and consequently the mind commences with a bias, and acts under its influence, the consequence of which is, that the conclusion is not so accurate as it otherwise would be. Not that, in calculating with figures, the disposition of the mind can make an unit of difference, the question being once fairly stated ”

“ The one unfailing bias in life is the bias for disillusionment, springing from the organic instinct for that real environment to which, whether friendly or hostile, it must adapt itself. Every man knows in his heart that he can not be saved through being deceived. ”

“ Day by day it will show a stronger and stronger bias to associate definite sounds with definite objects and ideas, a bias so comparatively powerful in the mind of man as to distinguish him from all other living creatures. Other creatures may think, may, in a sort of concrete way, come almost indefinably near reason (as Professor Lloyd Morgan in his very delightful Animal Life and Intelligence has shown) ; but man alone has in speech the apparatus, the possibility, at any rate, of being a reasoning and reasonable creature. ”

“ It sometimes makes one chary of believing anything—in questions Human as well as Eternal. The "Personal Bias"—ever in our heart of hearts can we at all times decide where it ends and impartiality begins? ”

“ Of all the causes which conspire to blind
Man's erring judgment and misguide the mind,
What the weak head with strongest bias rules,
Is pride, the never-failing vice of fools. ”

“ Widely different from this social and truth-attracted bias, different both in its nature and its effects, is the interest connected with the desire of distinguishing yourself from other men, in order to be distinguished by them. ”

“ Nay, the bias produces perversions of judgment even more extreme. Feelings and deeds we laud as virtuous when they are not in antagonism with our own interests and power, we think vicious feelings and deeds when our own interests and power are endangered by them. Equally in the mythical story of Tell, and in any account not mythical, we read with glowing admiration of the successful rising of an oppressed race; but admiration is changed into indignation if the race is one held down by ourselves. ”

“ Bias's uncharitable bias, believing the worst of the world, might seem to some a truism, to others a falsehood, according as their fellows have served them well or ill; but a brief history of some hypocrite's life, some misanthrope's experience, or some Arabian Stylobatist's resolve to be perched above this black earth on a column like a stork, might help to prove that "the majority are wicked." ”

“ Evidence right before the eye can be distorted by the 47 eye of the beholder quite as powerfully as it has been in previous ages of man. We can only hope that we have achieved greater insight and greater objectivity than some of our ancestors. The winds and currents of bias and prejudice blow hard and run deep in the minds of men. ”

“ Even where no personal bias can be suspected, contemporary and popular evidence is to be taken with great caution, so exceedingly careless are men as to exact truth, and such poor observers, for the most part, of what goes on under their eyes. ”

“ Such reminders will convince him that the reflex self-esteem we call patriotism, has had, among ourselves, perverting effects sufficiently striking. And even now there are kindred opinions which the facts, when examined, do not bear out: instance the opinion respecting personal beauty. That the bias thus causing misjudgments in cases where it is checked by direct perception, causes greater misjudgments where direct perception cannot check it, needs no proof. ”

“ Though, during education, understood in a wide sense, many kinds of bias are commenced or given, there is one which our educational system makes especially strong—the double bias in favor of the religions of enmity and of amity. Needful as we found both of these to be, we perceived that among the beliefs about social affairs, prompted now by the one and now by the other, there are glaring incongruities; and that scientific conceptions can be formed only when there is a compromise between the dictates of pure egoism and the dictates of pure altruism, for which they respectively stand. ”

“ The mental attitude of worldly wisdom is at cross-purposes with the disinterested scientific spirit, and the pursuit of it induces an intellectual bias that is incompatible with scientific insight. Its intellectual output is a body of shrewd rules of conduct, in great part designed to take advantage of human infirmity. [Pg 20] Its habitual terms of standardisation and validity are terms of human nature, of human preference, prejudice, aspiration, endeavor, and disability, and the habit of mind that goes with it is such as is consonant with these terms. ”

“ Temperamental bias is a habit, like another, only somewhat older, and, therefore, harder to deflect or eradicate. What do we imply, then, when we complain that, in a given character, no development has taken place? ”

“ There is a natural tendency in sects to narrow the mind.
The extreme stress laid upon differences of minor importance, to the neglect of more general truths and broader views of things, gives an inverted bias to the understanding; and this bias is continually increased by the eagerness of controversy, and captious hostility to the prevailing system. A party-feeling of this kind once formed will insensibly communicate itself to other topics; ”

“ In matters of this kind, personal bias, determined by natural constitution, education, and accidental influences, will ever play a great part: Teleology and Vitalism—both in one shape or another as old as mankind—will last as long as the race itself. ”

“ The rationalistic bias is in actual experience found to be as compatible with any æsthetic bias as with the scientific, specially so called; though in point of fact a scientific culture is in itself more conducive to rationalism in respect of historical and ultimate problems than is culture in the arts, which are mostly enjoyed, appraised, and even practised without deliberate resort to critical analysis. ”

“ Some persons fancy that bias and counter-bias are favorable to the extraction of truth—that hot and partisan debate is the way to investigate. This is the theory of our atrocious legal procedure. But Logic puts its heel upon this suggestion. It irrefragably demonstrates that knowledge can only be furthered by the real desire for it, and that the methods of obstinacy, of authority, and every mode of trying to reach a foregone conclusion, are absolutely of no value. These things are proved. ”

“ Mental illness is nothing to be ashamed of, but bias and discrimination shame us all. ”

“ This account faithfully expresses the disintegration which came with the great shock of what had come to pass. It is this disintegration and the resultant phenomena which are of utmost importance for the student of social science to observe. To be quite emotionally free in the observation of such phenomena, however, is almost impossible. It has been said of sociological investigations that
observation is made under bias because the facts under review are those of human life and touch human interest. ”