Opinion - "You're biased!"  "You're prejudiced!" Not particularly nice things to be called. Labeled as such, especially in today's world, you could find yourself in hot water very quickly. However, these labels are generally not unfitting, despite their slanderous nature. The only problem is that we all exhibit bias, but no one wants to admit it. Since it is Friday, let’s explore this topic: What does that bias mean for technologists today, and can you use biased sources to form an unbiased opinion on technology?

A recent article published on Fox News sparked in me a number of questions about bias: What is it?  How does it start?  Is there anyone really neutral?  What issues does it affect?  And how do we deal with it?

A high school student is challenging the bias of an "American Government" text book.  In this particular case, the teen is alleging that the authors are presenting incorrect or unbalanced facts, with a significant conservative slant.  Without having read the book, I can't say anything about the teen's argument, but I can say without a doubt that in order to perceive bias in the text, the teen is biased against the views of the authors.  That's not to say that the teen or the authors are wrong, just that their opinions and views of the world differ.  This phenomenon is actually well researched.

Psychologists call this issue Confirmation Bias: "Confirmation bias is a phenomenon wherein decision makers have been shown to actively seek out and assign more weight to evidence that confirms their hypothesis, and ignore or underweigh evidence that could disconfirm their hypothesis." In other words, we see what we want to see, not necessarily because of anything intentional, but because of the influences of our past experiences. I remember back in high school science classes, when we learned about the scientific method, that my teacher was trying to "prove" that a light bulb was really a "dark sucker".  Once he presented his "facts", the argument was really quite convincing. If it weren't for a substantial knowledge of light and how it works, he could have changed my mind.

It is a well-known issue in the practice of law that eyewitnesses are a very unreliable source.  Many people, viewing the same event can come up to drastically different conclusions of what happened.  This has nothing to do with people being unable to see or hear properly, but that our minds naturally interpret everything based on our past experiences.

Social Psychologists have gone to great lengths to study this in depth; more information can be found here, here, here, and here. I personally find interesting the research done at Harvard about subconscious bias based on word association.  The authors call it "Project Implicit".  I encourage everyone to try a few of the tests on the website; you might be surprised at your subconscious biases (or your biases about the subconscious association research).

So understanding that I'm naturally biased, as everyone else is, then it makes reading studies a little brain warping.  Here is a study of studies
(meta-analysis) about bias in college professors.  Numerous studies have been done to try and prove that professors are liberally leaning.  Now, regardless of the facts of the case, it can be concluded that when I read this meta-analysis, I inject my personal bias into it, in addition to the reviewer's bias, which is in addition to the original studies biases, which is compounded with bias of the interviewed students, all about the perceived bias of college professors (Brain recursion...  Segmentation fault (core dumped)).

Read on the next page: Technology bias