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.

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.

In Wikipedia

Allegations have been made that suggestions of bias and bullying at Wikipedia are routinely suppressed. Example: "A term that is not allowed on Wikipedia and is automatically removed by a wiki bot. Often known as the "secret 6th Pillar" of Wikipedia - that a page titled "Wiki Nazi" will never be allowed and immediately removed because editors at Wikipedia are NOT biased and we do not allow the concept that an editor of Wikipedia could be bias(ed) (www.urbandictionary.com). It remains to be seen whether these issue will be debated at large.

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.
• 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.

See also

• Prejudice
• Impartiality
• List of cognitive biases
• Scholarly method
• Source criticism
• Weasel word
• Detection theory
• Experimenter's bias
• Social desirability bias
• Political correctness