Bias is a term used to describe a tendency or preference towards a particular perspective, ideology or result, especially when the tendency interferes with the ability to be impartial, unprejudiced, or objective.¹ The term biased is used to describe an action, judgment, or other outcome influenced by a prejudged perspective. It is also used to refer to a person or body of people whose actions or judgments exhibit bias.

Psychology of bias

In psychology, cognitive bias is bias based on cognitive factors. One type of cognitive bias is confirmation bias, the tendency to interpret new information in such a way that confirms one's prior beliefs, even to the extreme of denial, ignoring information that conflicts with one's prior beliefs. The fundamental attribution error, also known as correspondence bias, is one example of such bias, in which people tend to explain others' behavior in terms of personality, whereas they tend to explain their own behavior in terms of the situation.

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Forms of biases

• Cultural: interpreting and judging phenomena in terms particular to one's own culture.
• Ethnic or racial: racism, nationalism, regionalism and tribalism.
• Geographical: describing a dispute as it is conducted in one country, when the dispute is framed differently elsewhere.
• Inductive
• Media: real or perceived bias of journalists and news producers within the mass media, in the selection of which events will be reported and how they are covered
• Gender: including sexism and heteronormativity.
• Linguistic: bias, favoring certain languages
• Political: bias in favor of or against a particular political party, philosophy, policy or candidate.
• Corporate: bias in favor of a business.
• Advertising: bias with observations motivated for selling an opinion rather than using objectivity.
• Sociological: bias in favor of a society's ideals. bias for groups needs/wants.
• Entertainment: bias in favor of entertaining an audience
• Personal: bias for personal gain.
• Religious: bias for or against religion, faith or beliefs;
• Sensationalist: favoring the exceptional over the ordinary. This includes emphasizing, distorting, or fabricating exceptional news to boost commercial ratings.
• Scientific (including anti-scientific and scientific skepticism): favoring (or disfavoring) a scientist, inventor, or theory for non-scientific reasons. This can also include excessive favoring (or disfavoring) prevalent scientific opinion, if in doing so, not able viewpoints are no longer being treated neutrally.

See also

References

External links

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