The psychology of bias

The term “bias” generally refers to the tendency to create certain opinions or to believe a

series of facts based on cultural or political factors. It can be positive, like, for example,

thinking that fast food is bad for your health. However, more often bias is represented by a

negative view caused by stereotypes or individual experiences and tends to come more from emotions rather than real facts.

Bias is often not perceived by the person who is experiencing it and in the rare situation of it

being noticed it can be more difficult to distinguish “good” bias from bad “bias”.

Bias can have a big impact on our lives, even if we may not recognize it. Many

decision-making problems are influenced by bias and it happens that they are negative due to the change in given importance between feelings and facts.

Another part of decision-making that affects our daily lives and that is modified by bias is

who we choose to surround ourselves with. People tend to decide on whether to befriend

others consciously, from observing their behavior and analyzing it and also subconsciously

from their aspect, and most importantly, it can happen that the accumulated bias will also

affect the view of a person.

This kind of bias is caused by stereotypes and it can refer to a social group, ethnicity, race,

sexual orientation, or physical aspects such as hair color, height, eye color, etc. In more

extreme cases, these differences can be pointed out through discriminatory practices.

What causes us to become biased?

From a very young age, we start to observe others around us by classifying them into two

categories: “like us” and “different”. Usually, we feel safer around people with similar

characters so we are more prone to judge individuals who are not as close. In more extreme

cases the differences between people lead to an “us versus them” mentality - this being one of the first signs of bias that can be noticed from childhood.

Types of bias

cognitive bias: thinking patterns that lead to unreasonable conclusions
actor-observer bias: blaming your internal mistakes on external factors while you are more likely to perceive others actions based on their internal factors
anchoring bias: relying on the first piece of information that you find ( the “anchor”)
attribution bias: trying to find a reason or motivation behind someone’s actions without any concrete evidence.