Philosophy Conflicting View Points Essay

Biases Chart

Bias

Problem

Example

Self-serving bias: the tendency to think that your successes are due to your actions, but your failures are due to external factors outside your control.

If you blame all problems on external causes, you may miss an internal problem that causes repeated bad decisions.

Alena has gotten fired from multiple jobs for being chronically late. If she always blames corporate politics or discrimination, she might never fix her bad habit.

Anchoring bias: the tendency to give too much weight to the first piece of information you come across.

The first piece of information you encounter is rarely the most important, and giving it too much weight may distract you from the real issue.

It's easy to be manipulated while shopping if you put too much stock in the retail price you see before the "reduced" sales price. If you're too focused on comparing the sales price to the retail price (your anchor), you may fail to objectively consider what the product is really worth to you.

Expectation bias: the tendency to see what you want or expect to see, sometimes to the point of inadvertently adding or deleting things from memory.

The more emotional investment you have in things unfolding a certain way, the less likely you are to recognize when the causes are actually different.

The trustworthiness of an eyewitness' testimony might be compromised if the eyewitness was subtly encouraged to remember events in a certain way during questioning.

Hindsight bias: the tendency to believe, after an event happens, that you knew it would happen all along.

Looking back, history often seems inevitable. This is especially important to fight against, or else we can fail to understand that we have real choices that will often lead to very different outcomes.

When you encounter a new claim presented as "common sense," you may be inclined to assume that you knew it all along, rather than scrutinize it for credibility.

Confirmation bias: the tendency to look for confirming evidence. When you want something to be true, you tend to look for evidence that fits with what you want to believe and ignore evidence that doesn't.

Confirmation bias can prevent you from reaching the truth—or at least fairly evaluating the claim at stake—even when you think you're objectively seeking out evidence.

Willis and Adam get into an argument about whether it's better to buy American cars or foreign cars. When Willis looks online for evidence, he puts more credence in sources supporting his position that American cars are better.

Tip: This is quite counterintuitive, but give more attention to new evidence that challenges your position. It's not that you always need to change your position, but if you do, the new evidence will suggest it.