{"id":4999,"date":"2019-11-26T23:37:54","date_gmt":"2019-11-27T04:37:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/?p=4999"},"modified":"2020-12-15T17:11:05","modified_gmt":"2020-12-15T22:11:05","slug":"youre-actually-not-always-correct-i-know-hard-to-believe-right","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/2019\/11\/26\/youre-actually-not-always-correct-i-know-hard-to-believe-right\/","title":{"rendered":"I’m Not Biased… You Are!"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Us vs. Them<\/p><\/div>\n

Think about the last time you immediately doubted someone\u2019s actions or statements. Maybe you thought they were only doing it for their own self-interest. Perhaps they stated a political opinion that opposes your own beliefs, or they agreed to complete a survey but only to be compensated with money, at least that\u2019s why you think they did it. Let\u2019s say you and a fellow classmate were talking about whether the new $200 million Colby College athletic complex<\/a> is reasonable. You say no! The college could spend that money on so many other more beneficial things. However, your classmate says they are all for the new athletic center. You know they\u2019re part of an athletic team so you think to yourself, \u201cYeah you\u2019re in favor of it because you\u2019re on a team and it would benefit you.\u201d But did you actually take time to think about that person\u2019s reasoning or did you just assume that they were biased and believe that you were the one being objective in the situation? We all may not be aware of it, but we usually expect others to have more personal bias and believe that we are able to judge situations objectively even though that may not be the case, and this is called na\u00efve cynicism. Although this bias may seem really similar to na\u00efve realism<\/a>, they have some differences. The cognitive bias of na\u00efve realism is the belief that a person can view the world objectively, and so can all the other people who agree with them and are \u201creasonable\u201d, in their opinion. Na\u00efve realism states that people believe everyone else who disagrees with them can\u2019t help being subjective because they are all biased. Both of these biases are also clearly related to the bias blind spot<\/a>, which is a phenomenon in which we are able to recognize how other people\u2019s judgments are affected by their biases but fail to see those effects in ourselves. Even though we may be educated on these cognitive biases, we remain susceptible to them and are unable to recognize our personal biases.<\/p>\n

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Na\u00efve cynicism is a cognitive bias that helps explain why humans usually notice other people\u2019s errors more easily than we notice them in ourselves. The term was first coined by Kruger and Gilovich (1999), the first researchers to study this phenomenon experimentally. They performed various studies that all aimed at examining how individuals have cynical expectations regarding how others take responsibility. In one of the studies, pairs of participants played a video game together and then assessed how responsibility for the game outcome was divided between them. They reported their own responsibility for different elements of the game and also how they predicted the other player would divide it. The participants tended to believe that their teammate would take more accountability for elements of the game that contributed to winning over unwanted outcomes of the games such as \u201cmissed shots\u201d or \u201clives lost\u201d. It turns out that people expect others to take more responsibility for themselves in a selfish way, even though that may not be the reality (Kruger & Gilovich, 1999). This expectation that others will egotistically make judgments is a result of na\u00efve cynicism. But, cognitively, how is this phenomenon explained?<\/p>\n

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The theory behind it<\/p><\/div>\n

So, let me explain why people are na\u00efve to be biased themselves and instead believe everyone else is biased. Metacognition, which is our awareness of understanding a topic (\u201cknowing what you know\u201d) sets the basis for being naively cynical. Our biases derive from previous knowledge and preconceived notions about the world formed throughout our lifetime. We have personal ideas about the world and have difficulty accepting different beliefs. For example, the weapon bias<\/a> is when people are more likely to see a weapon even when there isn\u2019t one, due to racial stereotypes (Payne, 2006). In this test of people’s implicit bias, participants were shown images of either Black or White men preceding images of either a weapon or a hand tool, and it turned out that people more likely to identify an object as a weapon if it was shown after a Black male face, even if the object wasn’t actually a weapon. This is because of the shared (incorrect) societal belief that Black people are more violent than White people. Most importantly though, the participants were not aware of the bias they were exhibiting in the test which helps explain why na\u00efve cynicism is a thing. The underlying cognitive process that we see play out here is that when we are recognizing faces or even patterns, we don\u2019t only access surface-level information. In this task, the fact that the face of a Black person primes people to think a tool is a weapon shows that we also access previous knowledge and stored information such as stereotypes.<\/p>\n

As you can see we don\u2019t actually know how much the concept of self-interest affects our everyday decisions. We think that we ourselves are objective and don\u2019t do things for our benefit, but instead, that other people are influenced by their self-interest much more (Miller & Ratner, 1998). When people were asked to what extent being offered money would influence other\u2019s willingness to give blood, the results showed that people overestimated others\u2019 power of self-interest (Miller & Ratner, 1998). Once again, they were wrong! Being offered money for donating blood did not affect people\u2019s motivation to volunteer, at least not as much as the (judgmental) unknowingly biased participants of the study believed it did. So obviously there is a gap between how much people believe self-interest has an effect on others and the reality of it. Lack of metacognitive awareness, anyone?<\/p>\n

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naiveness (ingenuous) + cynic (skeptic) = naive cynic<\/p><\/div>\n

It doesn\u2019t stop there though, even when people are presented with information that should show that other peoples\u2019 self-interest is not as powerful, they still stand by their na\u00efve cynicism. Critcher and Dunning carried out a study in which participants learned of students who were either academically honest or dishonest, and they then had to assess the influence of self-interest on those behaviors. It turned out that the participants were sure that students did not commit acts of academic dishonesty for their own self-interest, so to not be penalized. They also believed that at some point those who were honest would behave dishonestly (Critcher & Dunning, 2011). Even when we are shown people are being selfless, we still have a feeling that their behavior is influenced by egocentric biases.<\/p>\n

Okay, now you\u2019re actually aware of how na\u00efve cynicism affects our world view and our judgments of other people. Congrats! So next time someone tells you that they are doing community service because they want to help out in their community what will you do? Hopefully, you will at least take some time to consider that they may actually be a good citizen, instead of immediately assuming they\u2019re doing it just for the benefits of being seen as a moral person. Make sure you remember that you and I are also biased, and we are not always in the right.<\/p>\n

References:<\/p>\n

Critcher, C. R., & Dunning, D. (2011). No good deed goes unquestioned: Cynical reconstruals maintain belief in the power of self-interest. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 47<\/em>(6) 1207-1213. https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1016\/j.jesp.2011.05.001<\/p>\n

Kruger, J., & Gilovich. T. (1999). “Na\u00efve cynicism” in everyday theories of responsibility assessment: On biased assumptions of bias. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 76<\/em>(5), 743-753. https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1037\/0022-3514.76.5.743<\/p>\n

Miller, D. T., & Ratner, R. K. (1998). The disparity between the actual and assumed power of self-interest. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74<\/em>(1), 53-62. https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1037\/0022-3514.74.1.53<\/p>\n

Payne, B. K. (2006). Weapon bias: Split-second decisions and unintended stereotyping. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 15<\/em>(6), 287-291. https:\/\/doi-org.colby.idm.oclc.org\/10.1111\/j.1467-8721.2006.00454.x<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Think about the last time you immediately doubted someone\u2019s actions or statements. Maybe you thought they were only doing it for their own self-interest. Perhaps they stated a political opinion that opposes your own beliefs, or they agreed to complete a survey but only to be compensated with money, at least that\u2019s why you think […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9933,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[266316,370833],"tags":[266372,130416,130420],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4999"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9933"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4999"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4999\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6181,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4999\/revisions\/6181"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4999"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4999"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4999"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}