Bias
Bias can be good and bias can definitely be bad. It is tendencies and the actions we live out daily. Bias is the exposures and life actions that we have become accustom to that we have learned through our lives. The upbringing we have, our parents our siblings our families, our friends, our schools, our communities, the cloths we wear, the hobbies we have in short everything. I acknowledge that in my own heart and mind i wish no ill will to or harm to anyone. This being said i recognize and embrace my moments of poor judgement and conscious error. I don't think there is a person who is without bias, but i do believe there are some that never see it, and when it is negative make effort to understand and grow from it. As teacher i hope to teach in a school with a broad diversity of people from all walks of life and all socioeconomic backgrounds. I hope to afford students the knowledge via curriculum and content in the context of life and living. I believe we are inherently good people and that our negative bias comes from a lack of exposure and understanding of the true beauty of diversity. We live in a place of structured tendencies that differ by region and place, that each tries to oversimplify into a perceived norm. I have learned to look within myself as often as i can and work to understand those differences that at first blush seem incomprehensible.
I agree with you completely about people being inherently good. I also liked your explanation for bias being that maybe those folk just haven't been exposed to enough diversity and are afraid.
ReplyDeleteI agree with you that negative bias most of the time, comes from “lack of exposure and understanding”. I think another part of bias is the fear of the unknown or fear of the perceived known. It is not only lack of exposure, that causes bias, but also over exposure of faulty information or exaggeration, which can cause irrational fear and judgments towards others, if one does not question and examine their sources. The concept of the availability heuristic is that “judgment based on availability is influenced by the ease of which something is brought to mind (Ellis, Hunt 1999). If someone is exposed to one “reality”, they will make their judgments based on often their faulty beliefs (the perceived known), instead of fact, logic, reason or actual probability.
ReplyDeleteYou mentioned the over simplification of norms in relation to bias. Representativeness bias does just that. “One reason people succumb to such prejudices is because the representativeness bias simplifies the task of social judgment…. By relying on category memberships to organize our experience, we risk ignoring our understanding the tremendous diversity of individual cases and complexity of people” (Johnson, Zimbardo, Weber 2006). I think that examining, questioning, and thinking about our biases in terms of logic, reason, facts, and true probability instead of emotion and prejudice is imperative to decreasing bias. “To be rational is to be able to think outside of the constraints of our own experiences and beliefs and reach conclusions on the basis of abstract rules rather particular prior experiences” (Ellis, Hunt 1999).
References
Hunt, R.R., Ellis, H.C., (1999). Fundamentals of Cognitive Psychology. Boston: Mc Graw Hill College.
Zimbardo, P., Johnson, R.L., Weber, A.L., (2006). Psychology: Core Concepts, Fifth Ed. : Boston: Allyn and Bacon.