Cognitive Bias Research Paper

Social psychology is essentially the study of how human beings interact, behave and think around others. It is rooted in explaining the various different experiences we face each day in our social lives. Nowadays, film-makers try to depict these psychological phenomena in their movies to make them realistic. One such movie stars Emma Stone, an Oscar winner playing the role of Olive in the film “Easy A”. The film in short describes the high school life of a chaste girl, Olive, who conforms to peer pressure and starts lying about her sexual behavior in order to maintain a certain reputation as well as to help out her troubled friends. This eventually leads her to challenge her self concepts to extreme levels, causing her to either liberate herself from the façade she created or sink into the role. Easy A describes many genuine psychological phenomena and I am going to focus on three of them; Cognitive dissonance theory, how societal and cultural norms dictate our attitudes and thoughts, and different ways of persuasion.

Media, and its inherent manipulation, is the face of today’s propaganda. Instead of radio broadcasts, there are wartime journalists that travel to places like Syria and Iraq to document war. In a sense, there is more honesty in journalism, but media still controls and manipulates people’s opinions, and is therefore just another iteration of World War II propaganda.

People’s memories are greatly affected by preconceptions and the emotions that come with them. When one’s memories are challenged the response is that they must be right, and everyone else must be wrong. Dr. Neil Degrasse Tyson shows this example when during his show “Cosmos” where he inaccurately uses a quote from two different speeches of President George Bush’s to express a science of how stars were named. The quote was implying prejudice tendencies in Mr. Bush right after 9/11, and when Dr. Tyson was confronted of his misinterpretation his overconfidence of his memories he instantly configured that the confronters were incorrect. After evidence proved of his misconception, he admitted to his mistake and publicly apologized. Furthermore,

Are you, as a witness of the atrocity, culpable for the brutality, set forth by police? It is so what author, professor, and attorney, Bryan Stevenson, believes. The following is a quote from Bryan Stevenson’s novel, Just Mercy: “We are all implicated when we allow other people to be mistreated. An absence of compassion can corrupt the decency of a community, a state, a nation;” (source book). This is not a matter of racial discrimination, but rather an ethical dilemma covering the iniquity of the nation’s proposed peacekeepers. Police brutality stands declared as a controversial issue, since it perceptible nationwide. I don’t consider this partisanship limited to the judgment of pigment, because statistics prove otherwise. In 2015 alone, the

These cognitive biases are usually expressed when an individual already has a predestined argument even when the information at hand has no established truth (Pope & Becnel, 2018). Cognitive bias is a major source of hindrance to reader's investigation on whether the news is true or fake. When a statement addresses the opponent negatively it is automatically perceived. Cognitive bias does more harm than good. The capacity to control and stop fake news is the ability of the reader. For this reason, it is advisable to strictly ensure that the news is real before it's adopted and

Bias is a tendency to favor of one person, group, a thing or point of view over another, often, in an unfair way. Bias can be a personal opinion or a more public opinion, such as a news story, that only presents facts that support one point of view. Bias is common in writing and speech that we are not aware of, but it is the

The first concept that can be applied in everyday life is the primacy/recency effect. This can be defined as remembering primary and ultimate items with more ease than information received between the two. (Postman and Phillips, 1965.) This effect can be applied to everyday life such that when attending a lecture, students find it easier to retain the first and last chunks of information they receive as these are the points that they are at their most attentive. The positives of this being that information presented during these times is more likely to be retained, however any information posited to the students between

Election years, like this past year, often times bring up controversial topics that a person may feel more one sided about rather than the other. The topic of gun control laws seems to be one of the more popular topics that the public likes to talk about. With news stories depicting school shootings, police shootings, and other gun related violence’s, many Americans are unaware of how this is influencing their idea on whether the United States should have gun control laws. Many people may say that they feel like they are not influenced by anything when it comes to how they feel about guns and the idea of gun control laws. This however, is false. Many things such as availability heuristic, framing, and confirmation bias make decision making

People get categorized by stereotypes everyday just by outward appearances or the group of people they are associated with. A stereotype is a preconceived notion about a group of people. People form fixed images of a group that are assumed that all group members act and behave is a particular way. A person essentially gets stereotyped by being “guilty by association” of a particular group. All stereotypes get based off of a bit of truths that all group members similarly have. Whether it is behavior, attitude, or outward appearance. Stereotypes often get confused with prejudices, because like prejudices, stereotypes get based off of prior assumptions. Many also think that misconceptions are similar to stereotypes, but misconceptions are formed

As Robertson Davies once said, “The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.” Bias is prevalent throughout everyone's lives whether they notice it or not. Each person has their own perception on different things and that is what creates bias. In To Kill a Mockingbird bias is shown throughout the story, and affects the lives of the citizens of Maycomb, Alabama. Bias is also all over America, but many people just don’t realize it even though it affects their daily lives. My personal biases impact my daily life in good and bad ways as well. Biases constrict us from seeing the real image of the world, and that shapes it to make it how it is today.

You think the world is ultimately a just place; you will have a tendency to look for reasons to blame victims of inexplicable injustices. This is the concept of the cognitive bias “Just World Phenomenon”. The following example of Just World Phenomenon was presented to us while discussing the lecture on the different classifications of cognitive bias. During the discussion of Just World Phenomenon, examples were lacking to further explain, in more depth, about the actual bias. Curiosity was brought to my attention on the matter, wanting to comprehend the bias more thoroughly. In the novel “Riveted” by Dr. Jim Davies, a whole chapter is devoted to the topic of Cognitive Bias, and Just World Phenomenon is one of the many biases in chapter six.

Bias and the Law relates to my goals as an educator because it will help me gain a better perspective on which people with disabilities and special education are viewed in society. It also helped me realize why people believe special education can be too costly, burdensome, and infective. It also taught me the biases towards people with disabilities still exists, and why it can be a civil rights issues. Cultural Attitudes relates to my goals as an educator because knowledge on a family cultural beliefs can help me work with students with disabilities and their families on an individualized education plan that best suits their needs. It also taught me that every culture views disabilities differently some view it positively others try to hide

Cognitive biases are tendencies to think in certain ways that can lead to systematic deviations from a standard of rationality or good judgment. This bias occurs when people are processing and interpreting information in the world around them and attempting to simplify it would skew the processing while making decisions. Not all biases are bad, however they can lead to errors in situations such as social pressures, emotions, or individual motives that would limit the human thinking. Perceptual bias is a tendency to perceive or notice some aspects of an available image or piece of data while ignoring others. Perceiving expectations while focusing attention on a particular set is remaining selective and can be distinguished by emotional connotation,

Bias is prejudice about someone or something which has been created based on incomplete information. More often bias has a negative effect as it affects other people, our way of thinking that could be driven into stereotypes frame. Every day we face with a huge number of biases and some of us even do not know about the existence of them. If it gets to that point when something suffers from it, people need to overcome biases. There are a lot of examples of biases in our world. It is everywhere. An example of bias can be found in politics and media. Frequently politicians feel that the press is biased toward them in an unfair way. On January 20, 2017, a reporter from the magazine “Time” falsely reported President Trump removed the bust of Martin Luther King from the Oval Office. This information was quickly spread. Then further investigations reveal that the bust was still there but it was

Previous studies have shown its implication to the phenomenon of self-serving bias. Showing that cultural differences, degree of relationship, protection of individual’s self-esteem, role of individual, academic achievement, and expectancy are factors that is affected and can affect an individual’s behavior.