Dear CRT Students: I enjoyed reading through your personal examples of bias in question 10 of week 3s quiz. Kumiko and Tarik wrote about the placebo effect, Luz provided an example of the self-serving bias, Precious discussed the bystander effect, Destiny and Jayme and Jamila described the spotlight effect, Tessilyah wrote about the anchoring bias, Kadiatou, Amanda and Karla about the pessimism /negativity bias, Murshida covered the optimism bias, Md and Priscille explained groupthink, Sunjida explained the in-group bias, Leo wrote about the racial bias, Brian about the confirmation bias, and Rashida covered the reactance bias. We all have biases and experience the biases of others–the challenge, now that we discussed them in more detail, is: how can we avoid them or at least be aware of them?
By the way, a few of you seemed confused about the question about coffee drinking: “You love coffee and strongly believe that coffee is good for you. You drink at least 3 cups per day. When a new study reveals that drinking more than 2 cups of coffee per day is harmful to your health, you decide to drink no more than 2 cups from now on. Which bias is it?” The answer is: none. Because you changed your habit based on new information. Also, all of you, I believe, answered the first question correctly: “As Robert L. Heilbroner states in his “Don’t Let Stereotypes Warm Your Judgment” piece, the word “prejudice” means: prejudgment.” If you received a 0 (Blackboard appears to be case sensitive), I revised your grade.
I also want to congratulate you on your work on detecting bias. Your analysis of bias in news articles was right on target. Several of you selected articles about a possible invasion of Ukraine–and a few days later Russia has attacked Ukraine. In the best posts, you described the 3 articles, and then provided examples from each of them–and, of course, you replied to at least 2 classmates (which some of you seem to forget about–and thus lose 40 points). What is more, some of you said that you didn’t notice any biases, and this is good news, right? In the political pieces, on the other hand, the biases were more obvious. Lesson learnt? Always be on the lookout for biases, and try to get your information from a variety of sources.
Best wishes,
Prof. Barnes
