Bias

This article is about different ways the term "bias" is used . For other uses, see Bias (disambiguation).

Bias is an inclination to present or hold a partial perspective at the expense of (possibly equally valid) alternatives. Anything biased generally is one-sided, and therefore lacks a neutral point of view. Bias can come in many forms.

1 In statistics
2 In judgment and decision making
3 In the media
4 Other aspects
5 See also
6 References
7 External links

In statistics

Main article: Bias (statistics)

In judgment and decision making

Main article: Cognitive bias

A cognitive bias is the human tendency to make systematic decisions in certain circumstances based on cognitive factors rather than evidence. Bias arises from various processes that are sometimes difficult to distinguish. These processes include information-processing shortcuts, motivational factors, and social influence. Such biases can result from information-processing shortcuts called heuristics. They include errors in judgment, social attribution, and memory. Cognitive biases are a common outcome of human thought, and often drastically skew the reliability of anecdotal and legal evidence. It is a phenomenon studied in cognitive science and social psychology.

In the media

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 (Newton 1989). 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.

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.

Other aspects

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.
Heteronormativity: The belief that every person is innately heterosexual. Other sexual orientations are not immutable characteristics of people, but simply consist of sexual practices that are believed to be deviant.
Homophobia: The belief that homosexuality is inferior to heterosexuality.
Sensationalist: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 willfull bias, assumption or, putting conclusion ahead of evidence. In practice, this includes emphasizing, distorting, or fabricating exceptional news stories to boost popularity.
Funding bias in scientific studies also known as the agent-principle dilemma.
Medical bias is also known as a physician having a conflict of interest.

References

^ Wilcox, C. W. (2011) Bias: The Unconscious Deceiver. Bloomington, IN: Xlibris Corporation.
^ 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
^ Cain, D.M. and Detsky, A.S. Everyone's a Little Bit Biased (Even Physicians) JAMA 2008;299(24):2893-289.

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Bias

Look up bias in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

v t e Biases

Cognitive bias	Acquiescence bias Anchoring bias Attentional bias Attributional bias Belief bias Choice-supportive bias Confirmation bias Congruence bias Correspondence bias Halo effect Hindsight bias Introspection illusion Memory bias Motivated reasoning Outcome bias Publication bias Reporting bias Self-serving bias Status quo bias

Statistical bias	Ascertainment bias Bias of an estimator Information bias Lead time bias Observer bias Omitted-variable bias Recall bias Response bias Sampling bias Selection bias Spectrum bias Systematic bias Systemic bias

Other/ungrouped	FUTON bias No abstract available bias

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