I hope you don't mind if I ask a question. Isn't a biased opinion an educated opinion? And a nonbias opinion an uneducated opinion? And wouldn't that make all of your opinions bias.
Not at all. Bias doesn't define educated or uneducated, it defines a tendency or preference
towards a particular ideology or perspective. The term is used to describe a conclusion, an action or judgment that is influenced by a pre-judged perspective. Bias is inherently unjust, because it favors one side or another, educated or not.
There are many types of bias, including:
Media: where real or perceived bias of journalists and news outlets in the mass media shows up in the selection of which events will be reported and how they are covered. The Obama/McCain bias during the presidential campaign was a particularly blatant example of this.
Cultural: interpreting and judging phenomena in terms particular to one's own culture. One culture cuts off your hands, another culture slaps your wrist, for committing the same crime.
Linguistic: favoring certain languages (see Quebec, French. Also see, Tejas, Spanish)
Ethnic, Nationalistic, Racial and Regional: Where events and judgments are slanted to benefit a particular ethnic or regional group of people. (See Canada, speed limiters)
Sociological: a bias in favor of a society's ideals. Bias for groups needs/wants over that of the individual (See Guns, Duck).
Personal: bias for personal gain (See Load Offer, Refused).
Gender: Such as sexism, where things are skewed to favor one sex or another (See Ballpark, restrooms. Also see Workplace, pay scales.)
Political: in favor of, or against, a particular political party, philosophy, policy or candidate.
Religious: bias for or against religion, faith or beliefs. (See Gay Marriage, Gay Agenda).
Sensationalist: favoring the exceptional over the ordinary. This includes emphasizing, distorting, or fabricating exceptional news to boost commercial ratings. (Where everything, including stuff that happened yesterday, is BREAKING NEWS. CNN and The Weather Channel are particularly guilty of this.)
Scientific: where a particular scientist or prevalent scientific opinion or theory is favored for non-scientific reasons rather than with a scientific neutrality (See Global Warming, Climate Change).
A
cognitive bias is a person's tendency to make errors in judgment based on cognitive (the thought process) factors. It is studied in cognitive science and social psychology and falls under the blanket of human nature. Forms of cognitive bias include errors in statistical judgment and memory that are common to all people. Such biases drastically skew the reliability of anecdotal and legal evidence. These are based upon heuristics, or rules of thumb (mental shortcuts to the answers), which people use mainly out of habit.
One of the most common types of bias, and one that is quite prevent here on EO is the
confirmation bias, which is the tendency to interpret new information in such a way that confirms one's prior beliefs, even to the extreme of actual denial in ignoring information that conflicts with one's prior beliefs.
Most biases affect decision-making where the desirability of the options has to be considered (see the
"Sunk Costs" fallacy, one that Phil, for example, is likely to be familiar with). Others affect judgment, like the
Illusory Corollary, which affects the judgment of how likely something is, or whether one thing has anything to do with another.
Someone might be able to recognize the more common and most studied biases in the following list. Like, for example, someone who spent most of their adult life working in the paranoid industry of all things "spooks" might have a particular skewed bias based on some of the following:
Anchoring on a past reference.
Framing by using a too narrow approach and description of the situation or issue.
Hindsight Bias, "I-knew-it-all-along" effect, is the inclination to see past events as being predictable. See, I told you so! (even if you didn't)
Fundamental Attribution Error is the tendency for people to over-emphasize personality-based explanations for behaviors observed in others while under-emphasizing the role and power of situational influences on the same behavior. This is an error that gets compounded when
Political Bias is introduced into the equation.
Conformation Bias is the tendency to search for or interpret information and events in such a way that confirms one's preconceptions.
Self-serving Bias is the tendency to claim more responsibility for successes than failures. It may also manifest itself as a tendency for people to evaluate ambiguous information in a way beneficial to their interests.
So education is far from the sole criteria for bias. Indeed, education itself is often biased, in that what interests a person is what gets studied the most, to the exclusion of things of no interest, and that in itself will skew the education.
