• Subjective Reality: You Are Biased

    edited by Alexander Becker on September 12, 2006 | Link

    This essay is part of The Subjective Reality Series.

    You are biased. How many times are you confronted with the statement? How many times do you argue about your bias and how it doesn't affect your results?

    Your bias skews your observation of reality. Your bias makes an objective evaluation of anecdotal evidence practically worthless. Your observation is not neutral, try to just state the facts and refrain from interpreting them... Your bias is nothing more than a cognitive distortion, your cognitive distortion, of reality.

    Let's pause a moment for the definition: Bias is a prejudice in a general or specific sense, usually in the sense for having a preference to one particular point of view or ideological perspective. However, one is generally only said to be biased if one's powers of judgement are influenced by the biases one holds, to the extent that one's views could not be taken as being neutral or objective, but instead as subjective.

    In all simplicity: Of course, you are biased. You are absolutely biased. By definition. Even more, you are not only biased -- you are bias yourself. Bias is what defines you. Your bias makes you tick. In fact, you are nothing more than bias.

    To be more specific, we are talking about cognitive bias. Distortion in the way humans perceive reality. Here is a sample of five, more or less randomly, selected forms of bias.

    Primacy effect
    The tendency to weigh initial events more than subsequent events.
    Belief bias
    The tendency to base assessments on personal beliefs.
    Conjunction fallacy
    The tendency to assume that specific conditions are more probable than general ones.
    Omission bias
    The tendency to judge harmful actions as worse, or less moral than equally harmful omissions (inactions).
    Selective perception
    The tendency for expectations to affect perception.

    The most interesting observation about all those tendencies is that they are all so -- common. Now, please choose your favorite distortion of your perception of reality and try to neutralize it. Get rid of that distortion. Eliminate all distortions, everything that skews reality.

    More to the point: Eliminate all distortions that skew your reality? How would you do that? With what predictable result?

    Your distortions of reality are what differentiates you from any other human being. Eliminate your perceptive distortions and, congratulations, you make yourself obsolete. You are just not there anymore. I cannot see you because there is nothing that separates you from the background. You are invisible, not only to the eyes but to all other senses either.

    Thus, your selective perception enables me to perceive you.

    Naturally, through my selective perception. Is that an instance of the observer effect? You tell me.

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