Dear CRT Students: I enjoyed reading through your personal examples of bias in question 10 of week 3s quiz. 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. 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 1 classmate (which some of you seem to forget about–and thus lose 25 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
