Bias Judgement Quotes

Of all the causes which conspire to blind Man's erring judgement, and misguide the mind, What the weak head with strongest bias rules, Is PRIDE, the never-failing vice of fools.

When you are being judged by someone that has no idea who you are always remember this: Dogs always bark at strangers and usually there is always some wacko neighbor that wants to try out their new gun on an intruder.

It is hard to prevent oneself from believing what one so keenly desires, and who can doubt that the interest we have in admitting or denying the reality of the Judgement to come determines the faith of most men in accordance with their hopes and fears.

Judgement of others and ourselves always comes from a place of fear. It is fear that keeps us from living authentically all that we say we value.

It is a capital mistake to theorize before you have all the evidence. It biases the judgement.

Be very careful when you judge another human being. Do not measure anybody strictly based on the bad you see in them and ignore all the good. Be wary of any man who intentionally ignores another man's record of deeds or work history simply to impose their own agenda. Such a man's judgment lacks merit and should be disregarded immediately. Without a conscience, there is no truth in them.

[...] it is safer to wander without a guide through an unmapped country than to trust completely a map traced by men who came only as tourists and often with biased judgement.

Now the best relation to our spiritual home is to be near enough to love it. But the next best is to be far enough away not to hate it. It is the contention of these pages that while the best judge of Christianity is a Christian, the next best judge would be something more like a Confucian. The worst judge of all is the man now most ready with his judgements; the ill-educated Christian turning gradually into the ill-tempered agnostic, entangled in the end of a feud of which he never understood the beginning, blighted with a sort of hereditary boredom with he knows not what, and already weary of hearing what he has never heard.

Prejudice is an act of violence.

And, nothing I can do can change that I am sure that I also have prejudice/bias against some certain people. But, it has been my experience that I cannot always change such judgements just because I do my best. It is the person with the bias who must change not the other way around. If the person is a good and yet I have bias against that person, even if that person does something good, I may still look at that person as just pretending to be good. It is sort of similar to that. I don't think that is something that I can do anything about. It is impossible for everyone to like me. Even if things do change, it takes a really long time.

I am usually able to tolerate all kinds of victims of indoctrination except those who have been infected with xenophobia, racism, or homophobia.

Too often, opinion is a lens polished by the grit of bias. And as I stare through my own lens, I might ask how much polish can the grit of bias actually create?

It is of the first importance, not to allow your judgement to be biased by personal qualities. A client is to me a mere unit, a factor in a problem.

Someone told me recently that a commentator or some sort had said, "The United States is in spiritual free-fall." When people make such remarks, such appalling judgements, they never include themselves, their friends, those with whom they agree. They have drawn, as they say, a bright line between an "us" and a "them." Those on the other side of the line are assumed to be unworthy of respect or hearing, and are in fact to be regarded as a huge problem to the "us" who presume to judge "them." This tedious pattern has repeated itself endlessly through human history and is, as I have said, the end of community and the beginning of tribalism.

An encounter with God demands a response. An encounter with Satan demands your God's response.

Having sentiments make you susceptible to lies and misjudgment.

BE CAREFUL ABOUT BEING JUDGEMENTAL ABOUT ME. YOU WOULD HAVE TO LIVE WITH THAT IMAGE ALL LIFE.

It is a capital mistake to theorise before you have all the evidence. It biases the judgement.

I'm ashamed of my own reluctance, my lack of desire; but the truth is that I would be terrified to get into bed with a woman. Women collect grievances, hold grudges and change shape. They pass hard, legitimate judgements, unlike the purblind guesses of men, fogged with romanticism and ignorance and bias and wish. I can understand why men are afraid of them, as they are frequently accused of being.

We all have biases whether we admit it or not. Based on our vast experiences, upbringing, influences, choices and more. My question is, can you check ‘em at the door? And can you expand your capacity for understanding such that you are able to love even more? Before you judge, look within. Know that you might not even know. Then we can find common ground and continue to expand our hearts for anyone in need of more love. Humanity depends on it.

It is a capital mistake to theorise before you have all the evidence. It biases the judgement." "You will have your data soon," I remarked, pointing with my finger; "this is the Brixton Road, and that is the house, if I am not very much mistaken.

The cognitive point here is that we generally make sense of confusing things by judging them against various preconceptions. When confronted with a new proposition we don’t start thinking about it with a blank sheet in front of us; instead, we place the proposition somewhere in relation to our pre-existing structure of beliefs and attitudes, this makes liked much easier, because we can reduce even a complicated judgement to a simple binary one – does it conform to my existing views or not?

Availability, meanwhile, means that you make judgement calls on the basis of whatever information comes to mind easiest, rather than deeply considering all the possible information that might be available to you. And that means we're hugely biased towards basing our world view on stuff that's happened most recently, or things that are particularly dramatic and memorable, while all the old, mundane stuff that's probably a more accurate representation of everyday reality just sort of …fades away.

[...] I try not to think with my gut. If I'm serious about understanding the world, thinking with anything besides my brain, as tempting as that might be, is likely to get me into trouble. Really, it's okay to reserve judgement until the evidence is in.

The truly effective managers we've observed are purposeful, trust in their own judgement, and adopt long-term, big-picture views to fulfill personal goals that tally with those of the organization as a whole. They break out of their perceived boxes, take control of their jobs, ...

Creative thought in science is exactly this - not a mechanical collection on of facts and intuition, bias, and insight from other fields. Science, at its best, interposes human judgement and ingenuity upon all proceedings. It is, after all (although we sometimes forget it), practiced by humans.

You fight your superficiality, you shallowness, as as to come at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance, as untank-like as you can be, sans cannon and machine guns and steel plating half a foot thick; you come at them unmenacingly on your own ten toes instead of tearing up the turf with your caterpillar treads, take them on with an open mind, as equals, man to man, as we used to say, and yet you never fail to get them wrong, you might as well have the brain if a tank. You get them wrong before you meet them, while you're anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong while you're with them; and them you go home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them wrong again. Since the same generally goes for them with you, the whole thing is really a dazzling illusion empty of all perception an astonishing farce of misperception. And yet what are we to do about this terribly significant business of other people, which gets bled of the significance we think it has and takes on instead a significance that is ludicrous, so ill equipped are we all to envision one another's interior workings and invisible aims? Is everyone to go off and lock the door and sit secluded like the lonely writers do, in a soundproof cell, summoning people out of words, and then proposing that there word people are closer to the real thing than we mangle with our ignorance every day? The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It's getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful consideration, getting them wrong again. That's how we know we're alive: we're wrong. Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But if you can do that - well, lucky you.

Stories people told themselves were biased by the availability of the material used to construct them...what people remember about the past, [Kahneman and Tversky] suggested, is likely to warp their judgement of the future. "We often decide that an outcome is extremely unlikely or impossible, because we are unable to imagine any chain of events that could cause it to occur. The defect, often, is in our imagination.

As noted before, we’re unfairly biased toward what we already know, what we believe to be certain. If I believe I’m a nice guy, I will avoid situations that could potentially contradict that belief. If I believe I’m an awesome cook, I’ll seek out opportunities to prove that to myself over and over again. The belief always takes precedence. Until we change how we view ourselves, what we believe we are and are not, we cannot overcome our avoidance and anxiety. We cannot change. In this way, “knowing yourself” or “finding yourself” can be dangerous. It can cement you into a strict role and saddle you with unnecessary expectations. It can close you off to inner potential and outer opportunities. I say don’t find yourself. I say never know who you are. Because that’s what keeps you striving and discovering. And it forces you to remain humble in your judgements and accepting of the differences in others.

Like here it was that I entered that stage when a child overcomes naivite enough to realize an adult's emotional reaction as somethimes freakish for its inconsistencies, so can, on his own reasoning canvas, paint those early pale colors of judgement, resulting from initial moments of ability to critically examine life's perplexities, in tentative little brain-engine stirrings, before they faded to quickly join that train of remembered experience carrying signals indicating existence which itself far outweighs traction effort by thinking's soon slipping drivers to effectively resist any slack-action advantage, for starting so necessitates continual cuts on the hauler - performed as if governed lifelong by the tagwork of a student-green foreman who, crushed under on rushing time always building against his excessive load of emotional contents, is forever a lost ball in the high weeds of personal developments - until, with ever changing emphasis through a whole series of grades of consciousness (leading up from root-beginnings of obscure childish inconscious soul within a world), early lack - for what child sustains logic? - reaches a point of late fossilization, resultant of repeated wrong moves in endless switching of dark significances crammed inside the cranium, where, through such hindering habits, there no longer is the flexibility for thought transfer and unloading of dead freight that a standard gauge would afford and thus, as Faustian Destiny dictates, is an inept mink, limited, being in existence firmly tracked just above the constant "T" biased ballast supporting wherever space yearnings lead the worn rails of civilized comprehension, so henceforth is restricted to mere pickups and setouts of drab distortion, while traveling wearily along its familiar Western Thinking right-of-way. But choo-choo nonsense aside, ...

It is of the first importance,’ he said, ‘not to allow your judgment to be biased by personal qualities. A client is to me a mere unit, a factor in a problem. The emotional qualities are antagonistic to clear reasoning. I assure you that the most winning woman I ever knew was hanged for poisoning three little children for their insurance-money, and the most repellant man of my acquaintance is a philanthropist who has spent nearly a quarter of a million upon the London poor.

A more serious consequence of the illusion of control is revealed in our preference for driving over flying. At least part of this irrational—from a survival point of view—habit is due to the fact that we “feel in control” when driving, but not when flying. The probability of dying in a cross-country flight is approximately equal to the probability of dying in a 12-mile drive— in many cases, the most dangerous part of the trip is over when you reach the airport (Sivak & Flannagan, 2003). Gerd Gigerenzer (2006) estimates that the post-9/11 shift from flying to driving in the United States resulted in an additional 1,500 deaths, beyond the original 3,000 immediate victims of the terrorist attacks.

Rational-Emotive Behaviour Therapy (REBT), arguably the foremost modality in counselling today. As a college freshman in an informal study group devoted to reading and commenting on major philosophers, Ellis was struck by Epictetus’ insistence that ‘It is not events that disturb people, it is their judgements concerning them’ (Enchiridion 5). Ellis openly credits Epictetus for supplying his guiding principle that our emotional responses to upsetting actions – not the actions themselves – are what create anxiety and depression; and that (a point basic to Stoic psychology in general) our emotional responses are products of our judgements – are in fact (irrational) judgements tout court: ‘Much of what we call emotion is nothing more nor less than a certain kind – a biased, prejudiced, or strongly evaluative kind – of thought. What we call feelings almost always have a pronounced evaluating or appraisal element.’6 Ellis points out that irrational beliefs often appear in the way people talk to themselves. Compare Epictetus at IV 4, 26–27:

Because of the way our brains function, our sense of ‘me’ naturally runs in narrative mode: we feel as if we’re the hero of the steadily unfolding plot of our lives, one that’s complete with allies, villains, sudden reversals of fortune, and difficult quests for happiness and prizes. Our tribal brains cast haloes around our friends and plant horns on the heads of our enemies. Our ‘episodic memory’ means we experience our lives as a sequence of scenes – a simplistic chain of cause and effect. Our ‘autobiographical memory’ helps imbue these scenes with subtextual themes and moral lessons. We’re constantly moving forward, pursuing our goals, on an active quest to make our lives, and perhaps the lives of others, somehow better. And our biased brains ensure that the ‘invisible actor’ that is us seems like a good person – someone morally decent whose values and opinions are usually correct. The healthy, happy brain runs a gamut of sly tricks in order to help us feel this way. It ensures we’re often over-generous with our estimation of ourselves, imagining we’re better looking, kinder, wiser, more intelligent, have better judgement, are less prejudiced and more effective in our personal and working lives than is actually true.

As social phenomena, languages are tied up in world of unequal power relations, gaining or losing status not based on technical linguistic grounds but on social judgement, biases, and stereotypes that are based on the status of their speakers. As such, we argue that white America's love-hate relationship with black modes of communication can only be interpreted within a framework that considers language a primary site of cultural contestation. It should be clear by now that it's about more than a mothafucka, right? Our analysis of Black Language forms that the dominant culture considers inflammatory, controversial, or stigmatized allows us to make several observations. First, building off what anthropologist and linguist Arthur Spears noted in his discussion of uncensored speech, Black verbal culture, like all cultures is "a complex network of predispositions, values, behaviors, expectations and routines." Language practices, in their varying sociocultural contexts, can only be understood if read within the full range of the community's speech activities, and that requires rigorous ethnographic search and analysis. Second the community's beliefs and ideas about language- it's language ideologies- should be the primary point of departure for investigation and interpretation.

Sociologist Barry Glassner (1999) has documented many of the biases introduced by “If it bleeds, it leads” news reporting, and by the strategic efforts of special interest groups to control the agenda of public fear of crime, disease, and other hazards. Is an increase of approximately 700 incidents in 50 states over 7 years an “epidemic” of road rage? Is it conceivable that there is (or ever was) a crisis in children’s day care stemming from predatory satanic cults? In 1994, a research team funded by the U.S. government spent 4 years and $750,000 to reach the conclusion that the myth of satanic conspiracies in day care centers was totally unfounded; not a single verified instance was found (Goodman, Qin, Bottoms, & Shaver, 1994; Nathan & Snedeker, 1995). Are automatic-weapon-toting high school students really the first priority in youth safety? (In 1999, approximately 2,000 school-aged children were identified as murder victims; only 26 of those died in school settings, 14 of them in one tragic incident at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado.) The anthropologist Mary Douglas (Douglas & Wildavsky, 1982) pointed out that every culture has a store of exaggerated horrors, many of them promoted by special interest factions or to defend cultural ideologies. For example, impure water had been a hazard in 14th-century Europe, but only after Jews were accused of poisoning wells did the citizenry become preoccupied with it as a major problem. But the original news reports are not always ill-motivated. We all tend to code and mention characteristics that are unusual (that occur infrequently). [...] The result is that the frequencies of these distinctive characteristics, among the class of people considered, tend to be overestimated.

In 1942, Merton set out four scientific values, now known as the ‘Mertonian Norms’. None of them have snappy names, but all of them are good aspirations for scientists. First, universalism: scientific knowledge is scientific knowledge, no matter who comes up with it – so long as their methods for finding that knowledge are sound. The race, sex, age, gender, sexuality, income, social background, nationality, popularity, or any other status of a scientist should have no bearing on how their factual claims are assessed. You also can’t judge someone’s research based on what a pleasant or unpleasant person they are – which should come as a relief for some of my more disagreeable colleagues. Second, and relatedly, disinterestedness: scientists aren’t in it for the money, for political or ideological reasons, or to enhance their own ego or reputation (or the reputation of their university, country, or anything else). They’re in it to advance our understanding of the universe by discovering things and making things – full stop.20 As Charles Darwin once wrote, a scientist ‘ought to have no wishes, no affections, – a mere heart of stone.’ The next two norms remind us of the social nature of science. The third is communality: scientists should share knowledge with each other. This principle underlies the whole idea of publishing your results in a journal for others to see – we’re all in this together; we have to know the details of other scientists’ work so that we can assess and build on it. Lastly, there’s organised scepticism: nothing is sacred, and a scientific claim should never be accepted at face value. We should suspend judgement on any given finding until we’ve properly checked all the data and methodology. The most obvious embodiment of the norm of organised scepticism is peer review itself. 20. Robert K. Merton, ‘The Normative Structure of Science’ (1942), The Sociology of Science: Empirical and Theoretical Investigations (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1973): pp. 267–278.

Creativity always comes as a surprise to us; therefore we can never count on it and we dare not believe in it until it has happened... Hence, the only way in which we can bring our creative resources fully into play is by misjudging the nature of the task, by presenting it to ourselves as more routine, simple, undemanding of genuine creativity than it will turn out to be... We are apparently on the trail here of some sort of invisible or hidden hand that beneficially hides difficulties from us.

A rational judge will conditionally be accused of being biased as and when it suits either party's interest.

But, after all, the real specialist on Cannibalism is the Cannibal. Nobody could be more swiftly and splendidly on the spot than he is, when there is any Cannibalism going forward. The objection to the Cannibal as a judge of Cannibalism is not that he is ignorant of Cannibalism, or remote from Cannibalism, or not on the spot as a specialist in Cannibalism. It is that he is just the least tiny little bit biased.

After seeing a movie that dramatizes nuclear war, they worried more about nuclear war; indeed, they felt that it was more likely to happen. The sheer volatility of people's judgement of the odds--their sense of the odds could be changed by two hours in a movie theater--told you something about the reliability of the mechanism that judged those odds.

Clear Mind, Open Mind One of the core basics to understanding or intelligence is a simple. When one is engaging in the process of truth, one must drop all biased preconceived thoughts or conditions. Sweep clean your judgements From here a true view can be realized

Experts have been revered—and well paid—for years for their “It is my opinion that ... ” judgments. As James March has stated, however, such reverence may serve a purely social function. People and organizations have to make decisions, often between alternatives that are almost equally good or bad. What better way to justify such decisions than to consult an expert, and the more money he or she charges, the better. “We paid for the best possible medical advice,” can be a palliative for a fatal operation (or a losing legal defense), just as throwing the I Ching can relieve someone from regretting a bad marriage or a bad career choice. An expert who constructs a linear model is not as impressive as one who gives advice in a “burst” of intuition derived from “years of experience.” (One highly paid business expert we know constructs linear models in secret.) So we value the global judgment of experts independently of its validity. But there is also a situational reason for doubting the inferiority of global, intuitive judgment. It has to do with the biased availability of feedback. When we construct a linear model in a prediction situation, we know exactly how poorly it predicts. In contrast, our feedback about our own intuitive judgments is flawed. Not only do we selectively remember our successes, we often have no knowledge of our failures—and any knowledge we do have may serve to “explain” them (away). Who knows what happens to rejected graduate school applicants? Professors have access only to accepted ones, and if the professors are doing a good job, the accepted ones will likewise do well—reinforcing the impression of the professors’ good judgment. What happens to people misdiagnosed as “psychotic”? If they are lucky, they will disappear from the sight of the authorities diagnosing them; if not, they are likely to be placed in an environment where they may soon become psychotic. Finally, therapy patients who commit suicide were too sick to begin with—as is easily supported by an ex post perusal of their files.

As Richard Nisbett and Lee Ross (1980) point out, rationally defensible deductive logic involves a specification from the universal to the particular (“All men are mortal, therefore Robyn Dawes is mortal.”), but much less reliable inductive logic involves generalization from the particular to the universal (“This one Jewish merchant is dishonest, therefore all Jewish merchants are dishonest.”). However, we are prone to do the exact opposite: we under-deduce and over-induce.

Results of a recent survey of 74 chief executive officers indicate that there may be a link between childhood pet ownership and future career success. Fully 94% of the CEOs, all of them employed within Fortune 500 companies, had possessed a dog, a cat, or both, as youngsters. The respondents asserted that pet ownership had helped them to develop many of the positive character traits that make them good managers today, including responsibility, empathy, respect for other living beings, generosity, and good communication skills. For all we know, more than 94% of children raised in the backgrounds from which chief executives come had pets, in which case the direction of dependency would be negative. Maybe executive success is really related to tooth brushing during childhood. Probably all chief executives brushed their teeth, at least occasionally, and we might imagine the self-discipline thus acquired led to their business success. That seems more reasonable than the speculation that “communication skills” gained through interacting with a childhood pet promote better relationships with other executives and employees.

Another situation in which we attend to base rates occurs if people ascribe some causal significance to discrepant rates. When they can see the causal relevance of the base rates, they often incorporate them into their reasoning. For example, the belief that one bus company has more accidents than another because its drivers are more poorly selected and trained will influence mock jurors to take this difference in accident rates into account in evaluating eyewitness testimony; but belief that a bus company has more accidents simply because it is larger will not. Study after study has shown that when these rates are merely statistical as opposed to causal, they tend to be ignored. Exactly the same effect seems to occur in real courtrooms; naked statistical evidence is notoriously unpersuasive.

But what if current misery hindsightfully selects and reconstructs memories of childhood to be consistent with a miserable state today? Peter Lewinsohn and Michael Rosenbaum (1987) set out to answer this question with a rare prospective study of over a thousand citizen volunteers. [...] The results were consistent with the hypothesis that recollection of one’s parents as rejecting and unloving is strongly influenced by current moods; negative recollections were not a stable characteristic of depression-prone people. [...] This study of depression is important in that it casts doubt on the degree to which adult problems are caused by childhood ones. Given a biasing effect of mood on memory, people who are distressed as adults tend to remember distressing incidents in their childhood. And, if a person also believes that current problems have their roots in early life (perhaps because their therapist told them so), this view itself may serve as an organizing principle to produce even greater distortion of recall (remember the Conway & Ross [1984] study).

Perhaps the fundamental precept of probabilistic analysis is the exhortation to take a bird’s-eye, distributional view of the situation under analysis (e.g., a dice game, the traffic in Boulder, crimes in Pittsburgh, the situation with that troublesome knee) and to define a sample space of all the possible events and their logical, set membership interrelations. This step is exactly where rational analysis and judgments based on availability, similarity, and scenario construction diverge: When we judge intuitively, the mind is drawn to a limited, systematically skewed subset of the possible events. In the case of scenario construction, for example, we are often caught in our detailed scenario—focused on just one preposterously specific outcome path.

We can't deny the ubiquity of faith. If we write in such a way as to prejudge such belief as in some way deluded or false, then are we not guilty of elitism, of imposing our world-view on the masses?

People who would not ordinarily reach for a sexist stereotype - let alone consciously act on it - find themselves behaving in a way that inadvertently denounces a woman's competence solely because that idea of incompetence is deeply ingrained in a sexist stereotype: an image of women that should be kind and caring and not critical or judgemental. Any deviation sees women being disliked and denigrated, with their competence being brought into question.

Often, the work of exhausted employees suffers for reasons other than simple resentment. Tired people also think in more biased ways, focusing on negatives and making more unfair judgements.

As you practise more and more, your awareness will expand so that what was hidden becomes more and more conscious. Without judgement, you will become aware of your filters, biases, and limitations so that you will come to know yourself, and your experience of things, more directly.

Being biased toward unproven information is a sign of ignorance.

When the mind is infested with more judgement, conclusions and biases, than the actual urge for understanding, even the sun appears to be a candle and the ocean a pool.

During a staff debriefing, doctors and doctors-to-be explored the Hippocratic Oath, again, the one about not doing harm. Supporters apparently argue, “What’s the point of causing more suffering in this situation, when soothing is so readily available (for the survivors, that is)?” Of course, this is a personal opinion, a value judgement not necessarily shared by all medical professionals. For the record, I personally doubted the doctor’s choice, despite the circumstances, and wonder whether it was right to lie to the survivors, in the Grandest Scheme of the Cosmos. I can imagine myself responding to an order like “Tell me he died peacefully” with something more akin to “I’m so sorry, but I can’t,” and cross the subsequent bridges accordingly.

My own background as a diplomat well into a fifth decade biases me in favour of presenting a clinical picture of the global landscape, its challenges and complications as well as of the implications for India and a suggested course of action. This is what I have done for a living all these years. It is not that we avoid personalities and relationships or underplay their importance. On the contrary, so much of diplomacy is about chemistry and credibility that the human factor is always central to an accurate judgement. But what usually happens is that a vast number of objective and subjective elements are distilled into an integrated picture, which acquires a relatively dispassionate character.