Everything We Read, Watch, and See Contains Bias - Essay Sample

The natural affinity, disposition, or prejudgment toward or in contradiction of ideas, various groups, or individuals is referred to as bias. However, some biases help an individual or a group positively, for example, when someone reads an article on the types of practical exercises that are well known to improve the health of an individual, which assists in fighting diseases in the body. Biases are often centered on typecasts or stereotypes instead of considering the factual knowledge or the circumstances of different people and groups. Social psychologists tend to realize the positive and negative results of thoughtful shortcuts to result in a preconception that causes impulsive and reckless decisions or unfair practices (Ahler). The researchers mentioned that it is often learned, and it mostly depends on variables such as the educational background, the cultural deposition, and the social and economic status of an individual.

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The most discussed forms of bias transpire mostly when the media either support or attack a certain party-political group and also individual candidates. There are other common biases that many people encounter, such as promotion or advertising biases, conventional bias, overstatement, and conciseness bias. Advertisement biases occur when companies manipulate the stories of a product to gratify the customers. The overstatement bias is a type of journalistic bias in forms of media whereby certain procedures and themes in the emerging stories and sections are exaggerated to maximize the number of viewers and also the number of readers (Mitchell). Conventional bias raises an inclination to the description of what the whole world is commenting about and to evade stories that might insult anyone. Political bias has, for a long time, been a piece of the media since its invention resulting in the creation of the reproduction media. In the early centuries, the media reporters identified the notion of dispassionate commentary as the most crucial part of the editorial consciences. This overlay concurred with the development of mass media as a strong social influencer. The media bias is the most effective, and it mostly affects the political, social, and economic activities of a nation. However, until nowadays, even the most carefully subjective journalists are not able to evade or rather escape the allegations of media bias (Andreas). Broadcasting media have been used as a way of publicizing since the former eras when newspapers and magazines were being used, and it clearly shows that it is very hard to evade and fight media biases. This is due to the tendency of being owned by the governments and the boards linked to the broadcasting spectrums. Even though the mass media sector has been put into consideration and inclusion of private firms and the majority of its efforts to private handlers, the political aspects of the government still reign and mostly control the media in many nations across the world.

Some of the cognitive biases happen when reasoning, making decisions, remembering, reading, and in most cases when one holds to the beliefs and customs of various individuals and fails to make prejudged decisions regardless of the opposite information (Loesch 170). According to the researchers who are determined to solve the issues of social welfare, these cognitive biases are inclined to the procession of various information and in a faster way, particularly when someone is in danger of something and thus lacks to focus on the consequences of the mistakes that arise. Even in research, biases affect the results broadly by twisting the findings, which eventually affects the choices of the various schemes. It is mutually beneficial for individual researchers of biases to be familiar with the various biases so that they can conduct effective analysis with usability tests and blend in more cautiously.

Another form of bias is called the confirmation bias, which refers to the insensible action of supporting the perceptions that make known the pre-existing opinions while disregarding or terminating the thoughtful ideas even if it is acceptably lawful. When the individuals use an initial piece of information to judge subsequently, the choice creation is negatively affected by a bias called the anchoring bias (Porter), when an individual or a group is affected by the bias, often the judgments and decisions that are going to be made subsequently wrongly due to the bias toward transforming other ideas and information around the anchor.

In conclusion, have you ever come across circumstances where you are persuasively sure to know precisely what is happening only to realize that it is the exact contrary to what you thought? It is advisable to know that the way we view many individuals and also the backgrounds of the societies we interrelate with, there is usually a misconnection between what we ought to happen and the factual things. The misconnection is mostly due to the comatose insight bias. Individuals have common affinities to process the data and give it a sense of denotation, which supports the disagreements between the insights and the facts.

Works Cited

Ahler, Douglas, and Gaurav Sood. "Typecast: A Routine Mental Shortcut Causes Party Stereotyping." Available at SSRN 3550117 (2020).
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3550117

Andreas, Rossbach. "Constructive journalism: The Effects of using positive psychology to create narratives in modern-day journalism in Russia." (2017).
https://dspace.spbu.ru/bitstream/11701/9778/2/AnnotationoftheMasterThesis_AR.pdf

Loesch, Matt. "Conceptualizing Governance Decision Making: A Theoretical Model of Mental Processes Derived Through Abduction." (2019).170.
https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/publicservice_etds/41/
Mitchell, Eric James. America v. America: how media fuels partisanship in the supreme court confirmation process. Diss. Johns Hopkins University, 2020.
https://jscholarship.library.jhu.edu/handle/1774.2/62787

Porter, K. M. The influence of hypothesis disconfirmation on attribution error in juror perceptions of confession evidence. Diss. University of Tasmania, 2017.
https://eprints.utas.edu.au/23531/