Bias Origins and Types:
– Bias originates from Old Provençal into Old French, meaning sideways or askance.
– Entered English through the game of bowls.
– Initially referred to one-sided tendency of the mind, evolving to include undue propensity or prejudice.
– Types of bias include cognitive biases and patterns of deviation from standards in judgment.
– Cognitive biases may lead to perceptual distortion or inaccurate judgment.
– Examples of cognitive biases include anchoring, apophenia, attribution bias, and confirmation bias.
Framing and Cultural Bias:
– Framing involves the social construction of phenomena by media or political sources.
– It influences how people perceive and communicate about reality.
– Cultural bias interprets phenomena by standards of one’s own culture.
– Halo effect and horn effect influence feelings about specifics based on overall impressions.
– Self-serving bias involves attributing positive events to oneself and negative events to external factors.
Behavioral Biases:
– Cognitive and perceptual biases are distorted by the need to maintain and enhance self-esteem.
– They affect behavior in various aspects like the workplace, interpersonal relationships, sports, and consumer decisions.
– Status Quo Bias involves preferring the current state of affairs and perceiving change as a loss.
– Conflicts of interest occur at the intersection of interests potentially corrupting professional judgment.
– Bribery involves giving money or goods to influence behavior.
Regulatory Issues and Conflicts:
– Self-regulation involves monitoring adherence to standards internally.
– Conflicts of interest can arise, potentially corrupting professional judgment.
– Regulatory capture occurs when agencies advance commercial interests over public interest.
– Shilling involves giving the impression of being an independent client for marketing purposes.
– Risks to regulatory agencies include influence from high-stakes interest groups.
Ethical Implications:
– Bribery forms include money, property, gifts, perks, and kickbacks.
– The appropriateness of monetary transactions varies by location.
– Political campaign contributions and tipping can be considered bribery in certain societies.
– Regulatory issues pose risks such as conflicts of interest and regulatory capture.
– Ethical dilemmas in bribery, conflicts of interest, and regulatory issues can be defused before corruption occurs.
Bias is a disproportionate weight in favor of or against an idea or thing, usually in a way that is inaccurate, closed-minded, prejudicial, or unfair. Biases can be innate or learned. People may develop biases for or against an individual, a group, or a belief. In science and engineering, a bias is a systematic error. Statistical bias results from an unfair sampling of a population, or from an estimation process that does not give accurate results on average.
