Bias

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For other uses, see Bias (disambiguation).

Bias is an inclination of temperament or outlook to present or hold a partial perspective, often accompanied by a refusal to consider the possible merits of alternative points of view. People may be biased toward or against an individual, a race, a religion, a social class, a political party, or a species.^[1] Biased means one-sided, lacking a neutral viewpoint, not having an open mind. Bias can come in many forms and is often considered to be synonymous with prejudice or bigotry.^[2]
There can be many forms of bias. Some overlooked aspects of bias, occurring especially with the pedagogical circles of public and private schools—sources that are unrelated to fiduciary or mercantile impoverishment which may be unduly magnified—include teacher bias as well as a general bias against women who are going into STEM research, noted William Van Ornum, former research director of American Mental Health Foundation.^[3] Van Ornum is known for taking a multidimensional perspective toward bias, based both on his background as school psychologist and practicing clinical psychologist.^[4]

Main article: Media bias

Media bias is the bias of journalists and news producers within the mass media, in the selection of which events and stories are reported and how they are covered. The term "media bias" implies a pervasive or widespread bias contravening the standards of journalism, rather than the perspective of an individual journalist or article. The direction and degree of media bias in various countries is widely disputed.
Practical limitations to media neutrality include the inability of journalists to report all available stories and facts, and the requirement that selected facts be linked into a coherent narrative. Since it is impossible to report everything, selectivity is inevitable. Government influence, including overt and covert censorship, biases the media in some countries. Market forces that result in a biased presentation include the ownership of the news source, concentration of media ownership, the selection of staff, the preferences of an intended audience, and pressure from advertisers.

Main article: Educational bias

Unfortunately most discussions of educational bias focus on standardized testing. It is often assumed that "all" bias is education is caused by educational and standardized tests. This has become magnified due to legislation concerning No Child Left Behind. This law is usually falsely attributed to president George Bush, although its antecedents are found in the Clinton administration. Nearly all textbooks focus on test bias.^[5]
Taking a broad approach, William Van Ornum of Marist College ^[6] cautions that the simplistic pattern of conflating all educational bias with standardized testing can lead to a laissez-faire atmosphere were other forms of bias are not confronted. This is harmful to teachers, students, parents, and the general public.^[7]
Van Ornum stated: "It is especially important for students in education to understand and learn to confront sources of bias that occur when teachers evaluate students in elementary high school and high school. These forms include but are not limited to: teacher bias against very gifted students; teacher bias toward those who score high on standardized tests ("People like that aren't creative"; "This student just may have had a good day"; teacher bias against a current student because a family member was in a class previously and was either vastly smarter or not as adept at schoolwork"; teacher bias against athletes or teacher bias against non-athletes."
Finally, bias against LGBTQI students within the educational system itself may transcend even the aggregate amount of bias within schools caused, engendered, and brought about when standardized tests are used inappropriately.^[8]
Van Ornum suggests a continued empirical and multimodal approach toward bias in educational systems.

Main article: Political Bias

Political bias has been a feature of the mass media since its birth with the invention of the printing press. The expense of early printing equipment restricted media production to a limited number of people. Historians have found that publishers often served the interests of powerful social groups.^[9]

Contents

 [hide] 

• 1 Other aspects
• 2 See also
• 3 References
• 4 External links

Other aspects[edit]

• Economic: when people/government interpret a law/contract in their favor for economic reasons.
• Inductive bias in machine learning.
• Cultural bias: Interpreting and judging phenomena in terms particular to one's own culture.
• Racism, regionalism and tribalism: Judging people or phenomena associated with people based on the race/ethnicity, region of origin, or tribe of the people, rather than based on more objective criteria.
• Sexism: Judging based on gender, rather than on more objective criteria.
• Sensationalism: Favouring the exceptional over the ordinary. However this sentence structure makes is sound like an appeal to popularity or normalcy fallacy. This is actually a more complex problem, whereby, the proponent elevates the importance of the evidence to more subjects than it is relevant. This is accomplished by willful bias, assumption or, putting conclusion ahead of evidence. In practice, this includes emphasizing, distorting, or fabricating exceptional news stories to boost popularity.
• Speciesism: Favouring one species over others.
• Funding bias in scientific studies also known as the agent-principle dilemma (principal–agent problem).
• Bias of an estimator is a type of error in statistics in which a measurement is consistently different from its expected value.
• Medical bias is also known as a physician having a conflict of interest.^[10]

See also[edit]

Psychology portal

• Bias (statistics)
• Bigotry
• Color blindness (race) in the United States
• Detection theory
• Experimenter's bias
• Impartiality
• List of cognitive biases
• Prejudice
• Publication bias
• Racism
• Reporting bias
• Scholarly method
• Social desirability bias
• Source criticism
• Weasel word

References[edit]

1. Jump up ^ Steinbock, Bonnie (1978). "Speciesism and the Idea of Equality". Philosophy (53): 247–256. doi:10.1017/S0031819100016582. 
2. Jump up ^ "bias ...; prejudice", The New Merriam-Webster Dictionary, ISBN 0877799008
3. Jump up ^ http://www.americanmentalhealthfundation.org.
4. Jump up ^ "Crisis Counseling with Children," Van Ornum and Murdock, 1990, NY: Crossroad/Continuum.
5. Jump up ^ "Measurement and Evaluation in the Classroom", Oosterhofer, 2014. Boston: Allyn and Bacon.
6. Jump up ^ http://www.marist.edu
7. Jump up ^ "Psychological Testing Across The Lifespan," Van Ornum et. al. 2008, Saddle Brook, NJ: Prentice Hall, Pearson.
8. Jump up ^ "Psychological testing across the lifespan;" Van Ornum et al., 2007. Saddle Brook, NJ: Pearson.
9. Jump up ^ Ann Heinrichs, The Printing Press (Inventions That Shaped the World), p. 53, Franklin Watts, 2005, ISBN 0-531-16722-4, ISBN 978-0-531-16722-9
10. Jump up ^ Cain, D.M. and Detsky, A.S. Everyone's a Little Bit Biased (Even Physicians) JAMA 2008;299(24):2893-289.

External links[edit]

Wikiquote has quotations related to: Bias

Look up bias in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

• Bias, unbiased, and both ; essay : http://biasunbiasedandboth.blogspot.com/

[show] v t e Biases Biases in judgment and decision-making Acquiescence bias Anchoring bias Attentional bias Attribution bias Belief bias Choice-supportive bias Cognitive bias Confirmation bias Congruence bias Correspondence bias Halo effect Hindsight bias Hostile attribution bias Memory bias Outcome bias Response bias Self-serving bias Status quo bias Survivorship bias Statistical biases Bias of an estimator Information bias Lead time bias Omitted-variable bias Sampling bias Selection bias Self-selection bias Social desirability bias Spectrum bias Systematic error Systemic bias Other Academic bias FUTON bias Media bias No abstract available bias Publication bias Reporting bias

[show] v t e Philosophical logic Critical thinking and informal logic Analysis Ambiguity Argument Belief Bias Credibility Evidence Explanation Explanatory power Fact Fallacy Inquiry Opinion Parsimony (Occam's razor) Premise Propaganda Prudence Reasoning Relevance Rhetoric Rigor Vagueness Theories of deduction Constructivism Dialetheism Fictionalism Finitism Formalism Intuitionism Logical atomism Logicism Nominalism Platonic realism Pragmatism Realism

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