Science, Art, Litt, Science based Art & Science Communication

Qs on science and my replies to them - Part 108

THE SCIENCE OF JUDGING AND BIASES INVOLVED

Q: How do you judge a person from his beliefs or from his behaviour according to science?

Krishna: You don’t judge, you only try to understand. ‘Behaviour’ is a highly complex process and beyond a layman’s grasp.

A person’s beliefs originate from his surroundings, his cultural, traditional, religious, and emotional conditioning of his mind. If he is mentally weak, he succumbs to those pressures even if those beliefs are irrational and thinks he is right.

Okay, he is ‘right’ in his view, because his mental condition and the helpless situation he is in justifies it.

But for a rational person, he is ‘wrong’ because he is not trying to overcome his weaknesses, not analyzing his situation properly with a critical thinking process. Is he really helpless? No! He can come out of the hole he is in if he wants to. But not attempting it is the major mistake he is committing.

Some people might attempt to overcome it but with the wrong process. These too cannot come out of their irrational beliefs.

Others need emotional support these beliefs provide because their minds are not strong enough to stand on their own strengths. We can tolerate this too because we cannot expect everybody to be equally strong.

People say, everybody has a right to believe in whatever he or she wants to believe in. Right? Right, but there should be exceptions.

If these irrational beliefs are responsible for bad behaviours, harming the societies we live in, we have to try and control or eradicate them. How can they be harmful? Like this…

People harm themselves, people around and the societies they live in with their irrational beliefs. Consider these cases …

Bathinda shocker: Woman kills grandchildren in bid to ward off evil spirits

Parents allow exorcist to kill daughter, rape body. Wanted to appease god for gold

https://in.yahoo.com/news/parent...

How To Get a Vaccine Religious Exemption

Baby death: Parents convicted over vegetable milk diet: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-eu...

Women throws coins into engine of a plane for good luck and safe journey but in fact endangering the lives of people on board!

http://edition.cnn.com/2017/06/2...

Endangering others’ lives: Superstitions don't have any science behind them!

So we will have to fight them, without any doubt or exceptions.

Behaviour is dictated by several things. Your bio-chemistry - especially that of the brain, surroundings, your family, friends, relatives, conditioning of your brain, your health, your financial status, your biases etc.

When so many things are trying to control you, it becomes an extra-ordinary effort to overcome all these things and gain full balance of your mind. Only a few people can achieve that.

Flaws occur. When we ourselves are not perfect, who are we to judge others? Do we understand the situations they are in perfectly? NO! Do we know what factors are controlling them? NO! Do we know how the person is coping with all those factors pulling from all the sides and how he is yielding to those pressures? NO! Do we know his full background? NO! Do we know what wars he is fighting in his mind? NO! Do we know what his strengths and weaknesses are fully? NO!

We can understand only ourselves ‘a little bit’. Yes, even we don’t know us fully. Do you know fully the bio-chemistry of your brain that is controlling you? NO! Do you know how many cognitive biases are effecting your thought process? NO! Only things you know are the ones you can feel or think. That’s all. So your analysis of yourself can be faulty too. That is why sometimes we take the help of other experts!

When we ourselves can’t judge ourselves properly, there is no point in judging others where several gaps exist in our cognitive processes.

Just try to understand with a completely neutral analysis. You can never judge others, and not even yourself properly. Period!

However, if the behaviour, even if it can be justified in the mind of the person who is acting that way, or his group that is supporting him, is hurting others or causing harm, again it should be controlled or stopped without any hesitation.

Yes, some beliefs and behaviours are ‘unacceptable’ in a civilized society. Only because they harm others around. This unacceptability is not ‘judgemental’ because they are ‘painful and harmful’.

We don't see things as they are, we see things as we are and we are not at all perfect to judge people, situations and things.

Q: Why do you behave differently?

Krishna: Why we act differently?

Perception differs from person to person depending on one's cognitive abilities, biases, fallacies, conditioning of mind, education levels and distortions of the mind. We can tolerate different perceptions and the resultant behaviour only till they don't affect others' lives. The moment we think they are causing harm to the societies we live in, we will have to tackle them, correct them and put them in the right path. Not doing so makes you an impotent coward that helped the rotting of the world. Intellectuals cannot just be mere spectators.

Q: What are cognitive biases?

Krishna: A cognitive bias is a mistake in reasoning, evaluating, remembering, or other cognitive process, often occurring as a result of holding onto one's preferences and beliefs regardless of contrary information. For example if your priest told you vaccines 're against religion, it gets stuck to your mind and you start avoiding vaccines. And if somebody spreads a false propaganda saying vaccines cause autism, you start fearing vaccines and again avoid them. And even if I provide evidence that vaccines are safe and not against religious beliefs or they don't cause autism, you refuse to consider it. You even refuse to listen to my evidence. This has happened to me on a few occasions and I have very personal experiences in this regard and therefore, know very well how cognitive biases impact science comprehension of people.

When these biases hijack your mind, your thought process gets screwed up. So, unless you overcome them, by using critical thinking methods, you can never think properly without going wrong! Want to know what they are?

Here is a 'List of Cognitive Biases':

Decision-making, belief, and behavioral biases

Many of these biases affect belief formation, business and economic decisions, and human behavior in general.

Name	Description
Ambiguity effect	The tendency to avoid options for which missing information makes the probability seem "unknown".
Anchoring or focalism	The tendency to rely too heavily, or "anchor", on one trait or piece of information when making decisions (usually the first piece of information acquired on that subject)
Anthropocentric thinking	The tendency to use human analogies as a basis for reasoning about other, less familiar, biological phenomena.
Anthropomorphism or personification	The tendency to characterize animals, objects, and abstract concepts as possessing human-like traits, emotions, and intentions.
Attentional bias	The tendency of our perception to be affected by our recurring thoughts.
Automation bias	The tendency to depend excessively on automated systems which can lead to erroneous automated information overriding correct decisions.
Availability heuristic	The tendency to overestimate the likelihood of events with greater "availability" in memory, which can be influenced by how recent the memories are or how unusual or emotionally charged they may be.
Availability cascade	A self-reinforcing process in which a collective belief gains more and more plausibility through its increasing repetition in public discourse (or "repeat something long enough and it will become true").
Backfire effect	The reaction to disconfirming evidence by strengthening one's previous beliefs.^[ cf. Continued influence effect.
Bandwagon effect	The tendency to do (or believe) things because many other people do (or believe) the same. Related to groupthink and herd behavior
Base rate fallacy or Base rate neglect	The tendency to ignore base rate information (generic, general information) and focus on specific information (information only pertaining to a certain case).
Belief bias	An effect where someone's evaluation of the logical strength of an argument is biased by the believability of the conclusion.
Ben Franklin effect	A person who has performed a favor for someone is more likely to do another favor for that person than they would be if they had received a favor from that person.
Berkson's paradox	The tendency to misinterpret statistical experiments involving conditional probabilities.
Bias blind spot	The tendency to see oneself as less biased than other people, or to be able to identify more cognitive biases in others than in oneself.
Bystander effect	The tendency to think that others will act in an emergency situation.
Cheerleader effect	The tendency for people to appear more attractive in a group than in isolation.
Choice-supportive bias	The tendency to remember one's choices as better than they actually were.
Clustering illusion	The tendency to overestimate the importance of small runs, streaks, or clusters in large samples of random data (that is, seeing phantom patterns).
Confirmation bias	The tendency to search for, interpret, focus on and remember information in a way that confirms one's preconceptions.
Congruence bias	The tendency to test hypotheses exclusively through direct testing, instead of testing possible alternative hypotheses.
Conjunction fallacy	The tendency to assume that specific conditions are more probable than general ones.
Conservatism (belief revision)	The tendency to revise one's belief insufficiently when presented with new evidence
Continued influence effect	The tendency to believe previously learned misinformation even after it has been corrected. Misinformation can still influence inferences one generates after a correction has occurred.cf. Backfire effect
Contrast effect	The enhancement or reduction of a certain stimulus' perception when compared with a recently observed, contrasting object.
Courtesy bias	The tendency to give an opinion that is more socially correct than one's true opinion, so as to avoid offending anyone.
Curse of knowledge	When better-informed people find it extremely difficult to think about problems from the perspective of lesser-informed people.
Declinism	The predisposition to view the past favourably (rosy retrospection) and future negatively.
Decoy effect	Preferences for either option A or B change in favor of option B when option C is presented, which is completely dominated by option B (inferior in all respects) and partially dominated by option A.
Default effect	When given a choice between several options, the tendency to favor the default one.
Denomination effect	The tendency to spend more money when it is denominated in small amounts (e.g., coins) rather than large amounts (e.g., bills).
Disposition effect	The tendency to sell an asset that has accumulated in value and resist selling an asset that has declined in value.
Distinction bias	The tendency to view two options as more dissimilar when evaluating them simultaneously than when evaluating them separately.
Dunning–Kruger effect	The tendency for unskilled individuals to overestimate their own ability and the tendency for experts to underestimate their own ability.
Duration neglect	The neglect of the duration of an episode in determining its value
Empathy gap	The tendency to underestimate the influence or strength of feelings, in either oneself or others.
Endowment effect	The tendency for people to demand much more to give up an object than they would be willing to pay to acquire it.
Exaggerated expectation	Based on the estimates,^{[clarification needed]} real-world evidence turns out to be less extreme than our expectations (conditionally inverse of the conservatism bias).^{[unreliable source?]}
Experimenter's or expectation bias	The tendency for experimenters to believe, certify, and publish data that agree with their expectations for the outcome of an experiment, and to disbelieve, discard, or downgrade the corresponding weightings for data that appear to conflict with those expectations.
Focusing effect	The tendency to place too much importance on one aspect of an event.
Forer effect or Barnum effect	The observation that individuals will give high accuracy ratings to descriptions of their personality that supposedly are tailored specifically for them, but are in fact vague and general enough to apply to a wide range of people. This effect can provide a partial explanation for the widespread acceptance of some beliefs and practices, such as astrology, fortune telling, graphology, and some types of personality tests.
Framing effect	Drawing different conclusions from the same information, depending on how that information is presented
Frequency illusion	The illusion in which a word, a name, or other thing that has recently come to one's attention suddenly seems to appear with improbable frequency shortly afterwards (not to be confused with the recency illusion or selection bias). This illusion is sometimes referred to as the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon.
Functional fixedness	Limits a person to using an object only in the way it is traditionally used.
Gambler's fallacy	The tendency to think that future probabilities are altered by past events, when in reality they are unchanged. The fallacy arises from an erroneous conceptualization of the law of large numbers. For example, "I've flipped heads with this coin five times consecutively, so the chance of tails coming out on the sixth flip is much greater than heads."
Hard–easy effect	Based on a specific level of task difficulty, the confidence in judgments is too conservative and not extreme enough
Hindsight bias	Sometimes called the "I-knew-it-all-along" effect, the tendency to see past events as being predictable at the time those events happened.
Hostile attribution bias	The "hostile attribution bias" is the tendency to interpret others' behaviors as having hostile intent, even when the behavior is ambiguous or benign.
Hot-hand fallacy	The "hot-hand fallacy" (also known as the "hot hand phenomenon" or "hot hand") is the fallacious belief that a person who has experienced success with a random event has a greater chance of further success in additional attempts.
Hyperbolic discounting	Discounting is the tendency for people to have a stronger preference for more immediate payoffs relative to later payoffs. Hyperbolic discounting leads to choices that are inconsistent over time – people make choices today that their future selves would prefer not to have made, despite using the same reasoning. Also known as current moment bias, present-bias, and related to Dynamic inconsistency. A good example of this: a study showed that when making food choices for the coming week, 74% of participants chose fruit, whereas when the food choice was for the current day, 70% chose chocolate.
Identifiable victim effect	The tendency to respond more strongly to a single identified person at risk than to a large group of people at risk.
IKEA effect	The tendency for people to place a disproportionately high value on objects that they partially assembled themselves, such as furniture from IKEA, regardless of the quality of the end result.^{[citation needed]}
Illicit transference	Occurs when a term in the distributive (referring to every member of a class) and collective (referring to the class itself as a whole) sense are treated is equivalent. The two variants of this fallacy are the fallacy of composition and the fallacy of division.
Illusion of control	The tendency to overestimate one's degree of influence over other external events.
Illusion of validity	Belief that our judgments are accurate, especially when available information is consistent or inter-correlated.
Illusory correlation	Inaccurately perceiving a relationship between two unrelated events.
Illusory truth effect	A tendency to believe that a statement is true if it is easier to process, or if it has been stated multiple times, regardless of its actual veracity. These are specific cases of truthiness.
Impact bias	The tendency to overestimate the length or the intensity of the impact of future feeling states.
Information bias	The tendency to seek information even when it cannot affect action.
Insensitivity to sample size	The tendency to under-expect variation in small samples.
Irrational escalation	The phenomenon where people justify increased investment in a decision, based on the cumulative prior investment, despite new evidence suggesting that the decision was probably wrong. Also known as the sunk cost fallacy.
Law of the instrument	An over-reliance on a familiar tool or methods, ignoring or under-valuing alternative approaches. "If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail."
Less-is-better effect	The tendency to prefer a smaller set to a larger set judged separately, but not jointly.
Look-elsewhere effect	An apparently statistically significant observation may have actually arisen by chance because of the size of the parameter space to be searched.
Loss aversion	The disutility of giving up an object is greater than the utility associated with acquiring it. (see also Sunk cost effects and endowment effect).
Mere exposure effect	The tendency to express undue liking for things merely because of familiarity with them.
Money illusion	The tendency to concentrate on the nominal value (face value) of money rather than its value in terms of purchasing power.
Moral credential effect	The tendency of a track record of non-prejudice to increase subsequent prejudice.
Negativity bias or Negativity effect	Psychological phenomenon by which humans have a greater recall of unpleasant memories compared with positive memories.(see also actor-observer bias, group attribution error, positivity effect, and negativity effect).
Neglect of probability	The tendency to completely disregard probability when making a decision under uncertainty.
Normalcy bias	The refusal to plan for, or react to, a disaster which has never happened before.
Not invented here	Aversion to contact with or use of products, research, standards, or knowledge developed outside a group. Related to IKEA effect.
Observer-expectancy effect	When a researcher expects a given result and therefore unconsciously manipulates an experiment or misinterprets data in order to find it (see also subject-expectancy effect).
Omission bias	The tendency to judge harmful actions as worse, or less moral, than equally harmful omissions (inactions).
Optimism bias	The tendency to be over-optimistic, overestimating favorable and pleasing outcomes (see also wishful thinking, valence effect, positive outcome bias).
Ostrich effect	Ignoring an obvious (negative) situation.
Outcome bias	The tendency to judge a decision by its eventual outcome instead of based on the quality of the decision at the time it was made.
Overconfidence effect	Excessive confidence in one's own answers to questions. For example, for certain types of questions, answers that people rate as "99% certain" turn out to be wrong 40% of the time.
Pareidolia	A vague and random stimulus (often an image or sound) is perceived as significant, e.g., seeing images of animals or faces in clouds, the man in the moon, and hearing non-existent hidden messages on records played in reverse.
Pessimism bias	The tendency for some people, especially those suffering from depression, to overestimate the likelihood of negative things happening to them.
Placebo effect	The belief that a medication works—even if merely a placebo.
Planning fallacy	The tendency to underestimate task-completion times.
Post-purchase rationalization	The tendency to persuade oneself through rational argument that a purchase was good value.
Pro-innovation bias	The tendency to have an excessive optimism towards an invention or innovation's usefulness throughout society, while often failing to identify its limitations and weaknesses.
Projection bias	The tendency to overestimate how much our future selves share one's current preferences, thoughts and values, thus leading to sub-optimal choices.
Pseudocertainty effect	The tendency to make risk-averse choices if the expected outcome is positive, but make risk-seeking choices to avoid negative outcomes.
Reactance	The urge to do the opposite of what someone wants you to do out of a need to resist a perceived attempt to constrain your freedom of choice (see also Reverse psychology).
Reactive devaluation	Devaluing proposals only because they purportedly originated with an adversary.
Recency illusion	The illusion that a word or language usage is a recent innovation when it is in fact long-established (see also frequency illusion).
Regressive bias	A certain state of mind wherein high values and high likelihoods are overestimated while low values and low likelihoods are underestimated.
Restraint bias	The tendency to overestimate one's ability to show restraint in the face of temptation.
Rhyme as reason effect	Rhyming statements are perceived as more truthful. A famous example being used in the O.J Simpson trial with the defense's use of the phrase "If the gloves don't fit, then you must acquit."
Risk compensation / Peltzman effect	The tendency to take greater risks when perceived safety increases.
Selection bias	The tendency to notice something more when something causes us to be more aware of it, such as when we buy a car, we tend to notice similar cars more often than we did before. They are not suddenly more common - we just are noticing them more. Also called the Observational Selection Bias.
Selective perception	The tendency for expectations to affect perception.
Semmelweis reflex	The tendency to reject new evidence that contradicts a paradigm.
Sexual overperception bias / sexual underperception bias	The tendency to over-/underestimate sexual interest of another person in oneself.
Social comparison bias	The tendency, when making decisions, to favour potential candidates who don't compete with one's own particular strengths.
Social desirability bias	The tendency to over-report socially desirable characteristics or behaviours in oneself and under-report socially undesirable characteristics or behaviours.
Status quo bias	The tendency to like things to stay relatively the same (see also loss aversion, endowment effect, and system justification).
Stereotyping	Expecting a member of a group to have certain characteristics without having actual information about that individual.
Subadditivity effect	The tendency to judge probability of the whole to be less than the probabilities of the parts.
Subjective validation	Perception that something is true if a subject's belief demands it to be true. Also assigns perceived connections between coincidences.
Surrogation	Losing sight of the strategic construct that a measure is intended to represent, and subsequently acting as though the measure is the construct of interest.
Survivorship bias	Concentrating on the people or things that "survived" some process and inadvertently overlooking those that didn't because of their lack of visibility.
Time-saving bias	Underestimations of the time that could be saved (or lost) when increasing (or decreasing) from a relatively low speed and overestimations of the time that could be saved (or lost) when increasing (or decreasing) from a relatively high speed.
Third-person effect	Belief that mass communicated media messages have a greater effect on others than on themselves.
Parkinson's law of triviality	The tendency to give disproportionate weight to trivial issues. Also known as bikeshedding, this bias explains why an organization may avoid specialized or complex subjects, such as the design of a nuclear reactor, and instead focus on something easy to grasp or rewarding to the average participant, such as the design of an adjacent bike shed.
Unit bias	The tendency to want to finish a given unit of a task or an item. Strong effects on the consumption of food in particular.
Weber–Fechner law	Difficulty in comparing small differences in large quantities.
Well travelled road effect	Underestimation of the duration taken to traverse oft-traveled routes and overestimation of the duration taken to traverse less familiar routes.
"Women are wonderful" effect	A tendency to associate more positive attributes with women than with men.
Zero-risk bias	Preference for reducing a small risk to zero over a greater reduction in a larger risk.
Zero-sum bias	A bias whereby a situation is incorrectly perceived to be like a zero-sum game (i.e., one person gains at the expense of another).

Social biases

Most of these biases are labeled as attributional biases.

Name	Description
Actor-observer bias	The tendency for explanations of other individuals' behaviors to overemphasize the influence of their personality and underemphasize the influence of their situation (see also Fundamental attribution error), and for explanations of one's own behaviors to do the opposite (that is, to overemphasize the influence of our situation and underemphasize the influence of our own personality).
Authority bias	The tendency to attribute greater accuracy to the opinion of an authority figure (unrelated to its content) and be more influenced by that opinion.
Defensive attribution hypothesis	Attributing more blame to a harm-doer as the outcome becomes more severe or as personal or situational similarity to the victim increases.
Egocentric bias	Occurs when people claim more responsibility for themselves for the results of a joint action than an outside observer would credit them with.
Extrinsic incentives bias	An exception to the fundamental attribution error, when people view others as having (situational) extrinsic motivations and (dispositional) intrinsic motivations for oneself
False consensus effect	The tendency for people to overestimate the degree to which others agree with them.
Forer effect (aka Barnum effect)	The tendency to give high accuracy ratings to descriptions of their personality that supposedly are tailored specifically for them, but are in fact vague and general enough to apply to a wide range of people. For example, horoscopes.
Fundamental attribution error	The tendency for people to over-emphasize personality-based explanations for behaviors observed in others while under-emphasizing the role and power of situational influences on the same behavior (see also actor-observer bias, group attribution error, positivity effect, and negativity effect).
Group attribution error	The biased belief that the characteristics of an individual group member are reflective of the group as a whole or the tendency to assume that group decision outcomes reflect the preferences of group members, even when information is available that clearly suggests otherwise.
Halo effect	The tendency for a person's positive or negative traits to "spill over" from one personality area to another in others' perceptions of them (see also physical attractiveness stereotype).
Illusion of asymmetric insight	People perceive their knowledge of their peers to surpass their peers' knowledge of them.
Illusion of external agency	When people view self-generated preferences as instead being caused by insightful, effective and benevolent agents
Illusion of transparency	People overestimate others' ability to know them, and they also overestimate their ability to know others.
Illusory superiority	Overestimating one's desirable qualities, and underestimating undesirable qualities, relative to other people. (Also known as "Lake Wobegon effect", "better-than-average effect", or "superiority bias".)
Ingroup bias	The tendency for people to give preferential treatment to others they perceive to be members of their own groups.
Just-world hypothesis	The tendency for people to want to believe that the world is fundamentally just, causing them to rationalize an otherwise inexplicable injustice as deserved by the victim(s).
Moral luck	The tendency for people to ascribe greater or lesser moral standing based on the outcome of an event.
Naïve cynicism	Expecting more egocentric bias in others than in oneself.
Naïve realism	The belief that we see reality as it really is – objectively and without bias; that the facts are plain for all to see; that rational people will agree with us; and that those who don't are either uninformed, lazy, irrational, or biased.
Outgroup homogeneity bias	Individuals see members of their own group as being relatively more varied than members of other groups.
Self-serving bias	The tendency to claim more responsibility for successes than failures. It may also manifest itself as a tendency for people to evaluate ambiguous information in a way beneficial to their interests (see also group-serving bias).
Shared information bias	Known as the tendency for group members to spend more time and energy discussing information that all members are already familiar with (i.e., shared information), and less time and energy discussing information that only some members are aware of (i.e., unshared information).
Sociability bias of language	The disproportionally higher representation of words related to social interactions, in comparison to words related to physical or mental aspects of behavior, in most languages. This bias attributed to nature of language as a tool facilitating human interactions. When verbal descriptors of human behavior are used as a source of information, sociability bias of such descriptors emerges in factor-analytic studies as a factor related to pro-social behavior (for example, of Extraversion factor in the Big Five personality traits
System justification	The tendency to defend and bolster the status quo. Existing social, economic, and political arrangements tend to be preferred, and alternatives disparaged, sometimes even at the expense of individual and collective self-interest. (See also status quo bias.)
Trait ascription bias	The tendency for people to view themselves as relatively variable in terms of personality, behavior, and mood while viewing others as much more predictable.
Ultimate attribution error	Similar to the fundamental attribution error, in this error a person is likely to make an internal attribution to an entire group instead of the individuals within the group.
Worse-than-average effect	A tendency to believe ourselves to be worse than others at tasks which are difficult.

Memory errors and biases

In psychology and cognitive science, a memory bias is a cognitive bias that either enhances or impairs the recall of a memory (either the chances that the memory will be recalled at all, or the amount of time it takes for it to be recalled, or both), or that alters the content of a reported memory. There are many types of memory bias, including:

Name	Description
Bizarreness effect	Bizarre material is better remembered than common material.
Choice-supportive bias	In a self-justifying manner retroactively ascribing one's choices to be more informed than they were when they were made.
Change bias	After an investment of effort in producing change, remembering one's past performance as more difficult than it actually was
Childhood amnesia	The retention of few memories from before the age of four.
Conservatism or Regressive bias	Tendency to remember high values and high likelihoods/probabilities/frequencies as lower than they actually were and low ones as higher than they actually were. Based on the evidence, memories are not extreme enough
Consistency bias	Incorrectly remembering one's past attitudes and behaviour as resembling present attitudes and behaviour.
Context effect	That cognition and memory are dependent on context, such that out-of-context memories are more difficult to retrieve than in-context memories (e.g., recall time and accuracy for a work-related memory will be lower at home, and vice versa)
Cross-race effect	The tendency for people of one race to have difficulty identifying members of a race other than their own.
Cryptomnesia	A form of misattribution where a memory is mistaken for imagination, because there is no subjective experience of it being a memory.
Egocentric bias	Recalling the past in a self-serving manner, e.g., remembering one's exam grades as being better than they were, or remembering a caught fish as bigger than it really was.
Fading affect bias	A bias in which the emotion associated with unpleasant memories fades more quickly than the emotion associated with positive events
False memory	A form of misattribution where imagination is mistaken for a memory.
Generation effect (Self-generation effect)	That self-generated information is remembered best. For instance, people are better able to recall memories of statements that they have generated than similar statements generated by others.
Google effect	The tendency to forget information that can be found readily online by using Internet search engines.
Hindsight bias	The inclination to see past events as being more predictable than they actually were; also called the "I-knew-it-all-along" effect.
Humor effect	That humorous items are more easily remembered than non-humorous ones, which might be explained by the distinctiveness of humor, the increased cognitive processing time to understand the humor, or the emotional arousal caused by the humor.
Illusion of truth effect	That people are more likely to identify as true statements those they have previously heard (even if they cannot consciously remember having heard them), regardless of the actual validity of the statement. In other words, a person is more likely to believe a familiar statement than an unfamiliar one.
Illusory correlation	Inaccurately remembering a relationship between two events.
Lag effect	The phenomenon whereby learning is greater when studying is spread out over time, as opposed to studying the same amount of time in a single session. See also spacing effect.
Leveling and sharpening	Memory distortions introduced by the loss of details in a recollection over time, often concurrent with sharpening or selective recollection of certain details that take on exaggerated significance in relation to the details or aspects of the experience lost through leveling. Both biases may be reinforced over time, and by repeated recollection or re-telling of a memory.
Levels-of-processing effect	That different methods of encoding information into memory have different levels of effectiveness.
List-length effect	A smaller percentage of items are remembered in a longer list, but as the length of the list increases, the absolute number of items remembered increases as well. For example, consider a list of 30 items ("L30") and a list of 100 items ("L100"). An individual may remember 15 items from L30, or 50%, whereas the individual may remember 40 items from L100, or 40%. Although the percent of L30 items remembered (50%) is greater than the percent of L100 (40%), more L100 items (40) are remembered than L30 items (15).
Misinformation effect	Memory becoming less accurate because of interference from post-event information.
Modality effect	That memory recall is higher for the last items of a list when the list items were received via speech than when they were received through writing.
Mood-congruent memory bias	The improved recall of information congruent with one's current mood.
Next-in-line effect	People taking turns speaking in a group tend to have diminished recall for the words of others who spoke immediately before them.
Part-list cueing effect	That being shown some items from a list and later retrieving one item causes it to become harder to retrieve the other items.
Peak-end rule	That people seem to perceive not the sum of an experience but the average of how it was at its peak (e.g., pleasant or unpleasant) and how it ended.
Persistence	The unwanted recurrence of memories of a traumatic event.
Picture superiority effect	The notion that concepts that are learned by viewing pictures are more easily and frequently recalled than are concepts that are learned by viewing their written word form counterparts.
Positivity effect (Socioemotional selectivity theory)	That older adults favor positive over negative information in their memories.
Primacy effect, recency effect & serial position effect	That items near the end of a sequence are the easiest to recall, followed by the items at the beginning of a sequence; items in the middle are the least likely to be remembered.
Processing difficulty effect	That information that takes longer to read and is thought about more (processed with more difficulty) is more easily remembered.
Reminiscence bump	The recalling of more personal events from adolescence and early adulthood than personal events from other lifetime periods
Rosy retrospection	The remembering of the past as having been better than it really was.
Self-relevance effect	That memories relating to the self are better recalled than similar information relating to others.
Source confusion	Confusing episodic memories with other information, creating distorted memories.
Spacing effect	That information is better recalled if exposure to it is repeated over a long span of time rather than a short one.
Spotlight effect	The tendency to overestimate the amount that other people notice your appearance or behavior.
Stereotypical bias	Memory distorted towards stereotypes (e.g., racial or gender)
Suffix effect	Diminishment of the recency effect because a sound item is appended to the list that the subject is not required to recall.
Suggestibility	A form of misattribution where ideas suggested by a questioner are mistaken for memory.
Tachypsychia	When time perceived by the individual either lengthens, making events appear to slow down, or contracts.
Telescoping effect	The tendency to displace recent events backward in time and remote events forward in time, so that recent events appear more remote, and remote events, more recent.
Testing effect	The fact that you more easily remember information you have read by rewriting it instead of rereading it.
Tip of the tongue phenomenon	When a subject is able to recall parts of an item, or related information, but is frustratingly unable to recall the whole item. This is thought to be an instance of "blocking" where multiple similar memories are being recalled and interfere with each other.
Travis Syndrome	Overestimating the significance of the present. It is related to the enlightenment Idea of Progress and chronological snobbery with possibly an appeal to novelty logical fallacy being part of the bias.
Verbatim effect	That the "gist" of what someone has said is better remembered than the verbatim wording. This is because memories are representations, not exact copies.
von Restorff effect	That an item that sticks out is more likely to be remembered than other items
Zeigarnik effect	That uncompleted or interrupted tasks are remembered better than completed ones.

Biases list source: Wikipedia

Q: Do you think, after scientifically analyzing them, people who are judging others on various TV shows, beauty contests etc. are doing their job correctly?

Krishna: No! This might sound alarming but science has evidence for my answer.

Most of these contestants would be trained to behave in a certain way. They just parrot all the sweet words they were asked to use, presenting only their positive traits before the world and camouflaging their negative personality aspects.

These people might be having totally different traits outside the contest arena.

The judges too are not perfect. They might have their biases that impact their judgement. No, these are not perfect.

Moreover, science says there is a phenomenon called as the "Matthew effect" that dictate terms in judging awards and prizes.

The Matthew effect of accumulated advantage, described in sociology, is a phenomenon sometimes summarized by the adage that "the rich get richer and the poor get poorer."

A small number of people stand at the top of their fields, commanding the lion's share of funding, awards, citations, and prestigious academic appointments. But are they better and smarter than their peers? No!

But the benefits of winning an early-career grant or award were enormous. Those who already won will get more while those who didn't get any before will not be judged positively even if their effort is equally good.

De Vaan, the researcher of this phenomenon, says that two main mechanisms may explain the Matthew effect in all fields, including science. First, winners achieve status that can tilt the playing field in their direction when it comes to funding, awards, and job opportunities. The second is participation, meaning that successful applicants continue seeking grant money, awards, prizes while unsuccessful applicants often give up, withdrawing from future competition.

De Vaan and his coauthors argue that the Matthew effect erodes the quality of judgement based on an applicant's status, not merit. They recommend several reforms to the process, including limiting information judges have about previous awards. They also suggest that rejected applicants learn their scores, which might encourage those just below the threshold to try again.

Well, this happens everywhere. When people complain that all the big pieces of a cake are going to the famous and the successful ones, take them seriously. This is a fact, not just a complaint. And try to remove these imbalances.

Curious that we spend more time congratulating people who have succeeded than encouraging people who have not - Neil deGrasse Tyson

Q: How do you judge a work of art or scientific discovery?

Krishna: One of the central challenges is to have a definition that can be satisfactorily applied across all manifestations of creativity regardless of whether the ‘object’ being judged is a work of art or a scientific theory or a public policy strategy. Another stems from the problem of inherent subjectivity when judging and classifying an ‘object’ as one that is less or more creative. What yardstick am I using in such a context? And how similar is it to the one you are using? Do I have enough background knowledge or the necessary expertise as a judge to make that decision? Even if I did, how do the limits of what I know or how I think constrain my ability to recognize instances of creativity in others?

Judging a work of art is always based on perception based on your biases and conditioning of your mind. Therefore it is not perfect. My art work might look like a silly piece of rubbish to you. Most pure art related people cannot truly understand the concepts of my science-based art. Then how can they judge it?

However, science has some strict rules or scientific methods to judge their genuineness. Also the usefulness of a scientific theory lies in its application that can be used to people to their benefit.

Q: If people can't judge properly, how can they decide on the best performance and give awards and prizes? Will double blind judging help?

Krishna: If things depend on perceptions and biases, yes, judging becomes imperfect even if it is blinded. However, if you are trying double blind method, it somewhat helps by restricting some biases. Even using AI to judge things helps to some extent. 80% correctness is better than 50% correctness any day.

However, perfect judgment is not possible in any method. You will have to face imperfectness and biases. Just grin and bear it.

Q: Are women the prominent victims of biases in science?

Krishna: Do you know how many Nobel Prizes have gone to men in its 120 years? What about women? The proportion is shocking: 817 prizes to men, and just 47 to women. The Matilda effect is a theory that addresses sexist discrimination in the world of science.

Women are also less likely to be cited in science papers written by men, and their ideas more likely to be attributed to male researchers. Women receive less credit for their scientific work than they deserve. Not surprisingly, this can unduly hamper the advancement of their careers.

While scientists might measure their achievements in publications and citations, the rest of the world is more likely to appreciate their accomplishments—and ingrained attitudes are more likely to change—from the media coverage surrounding major scientific awards. And women get them very rarely.

This article explains all that very clearly: can-prizes-help-women-shatter-sciences-glass-ceiling?

This mindset is also reflected in the findings of a 2017 report by Elsevier that looked at the authorship of more than 62 million peer-reviewed papers published over the previous two decades. The analysis found that in 8 of 11 countries studied, the share of women authors grew from about 30 percent in the late 1990s to about 40 percent in recent years. However, female authors were more likely to be represented in health-care–related fields such as nursing and psychology than in the “hard” sciences. This may be due to gender bias in peer review: a self-assessment by the journal eLife found that men had greater chances of getting published than women when facing all-male review panels.

That is how bad these gender biases are!

Q: People say smoking and drinking women set bad examples. Aren't men who drink and smoke do that too. Why these double standards?

Krishna: Everybody has the right to live in the way they want. I agree. But only if ‘that way’ doesn’t cause harm to others. When a thief says, he has the right to steal your cell phone to feed his children, do you agree with him and don’t report it to the police? Okay it is illegal to steal. It is illegal to spoil others’ health too. That is why you are not allowed to smoke in public places.

As a scientist I don’t see drinking or smoking as a moral issue or a character issue. It is a health issue for me. Children born to smoking and drinking mothers or fathers will have severe health complications. That is not the right way to bring your future generations into this world and bring them up. That is causing harm to others. If a woman drinks and smokes it would be better for her not to have children at all because a smoking and drinking woman causes more harm to her children, than her partner who drinks and smokes because she has to carry her children in her body as a part of her body for nine months and then feed them for a few more months. I can show you hundreds of research papers as evidence.

You can’t see the whole picture like I do and are judging things superficially because you don’t know the scientific facts. This is what we call partial picture paralysis. It is better if you don’t argue if you can’t see and don’t understand things properly.

Reforms are for the betterment of the society - that includes health issues too, not only moral issues.

Q: They say 'don't judge a book by its cover'. Is this really possible?

Krishna: Recently I came across a fellowship on science book writing. There five people ( one author and scientist, one journalist and author, one author and film maker, one author and policy advisor, one author and economic strategist) judged who 's the best writer and best book just based on 250 words - abstract - of the books people are about to write on science and decided who should get the fellowship. Hmmm!

How can anybody who is not related to science judge a book a person is about to write on science just based on the title and 250 words? You can write a beautiful poem to attract the judges using all nice words and great thoughts. But these things need not reflect in the book in reality.

How can just authors decide on what science topic is good for writing? They can think about a few themes that are popular that's all!

Do the right people get the chance to obtain the fellowship? NO!

I knew the futility of all this exercise. But such things happen! What can you say about it?

If the cover of a book is attractive, if the title sounds attractive, if the author is popular, if the few lines people write on the back cover sounds attractive, people may buy it - and read it but only after reading the book can anybody say whether the book really stands up to the hype.

And how people process the book is also important. The book of a popular or your favourite author might arise positive vibes in you and that might influence your thinking that that book you just read 's very good.

But is it really good? Now define what 'good' is before going further!

Q: Why do only the famous get all the prizes and awards?

Krishna: Matthew Effect!

Many times I saw that the bodies that oversee the prizes and awards advertise that they had given these to very famous and popular people to attract many nominations and people to their awards and prizes. However, when an equally or more deserving person is also nominated along with some famous persons, the famous persons will be given prizes and awards.

Then what is the criteria you are using to choose them? Popularity or their work? It looks like you are giving the prizes to their popularity, not to their work! So everybody tries to become popular/famous instead of working for a cause! You yourself are diluting the work then and the principles that guide the prize/award. The prize/award value is decreasing. This has reached ridiculous proportions.
But the world is like that. Is there any use in complaining? That is why judging is highly complicated and somewhat biased. Accept that.

Q: After reading about biases several people asked me how they can overcome their biases and understand science as it is.

Krishna: This is my reply to them: Develop critical thinking.

Watch this video that I think can help you ...

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Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on July 8, 2018 at 9:45am

457

People view rationality and reasonableness as distinct principles of judgment

https://phys.org/news/2020-01-people-view-rationality-distinct-prin...

Permalink Reply by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on April 8, 2024 at 10:01am

Q: Why don't scientists like Dr. Tessy Thomas don't get many awards, while unworthy people get them so easily?

Krishna: Hmmm!

The field of science is different from the field of art. The perceptions here are different.

I know two people of art who get an award every alternate day and celebrate them like hell!

One is a painter, and the other one is a singer. Just ordinary ones. Two amongst the millions like them. But still why do they get so many awards and so much recognition?

Things that get you recognition in the art field: Good Connections! Well developed social circles and skills. The "Matthew effect"*.

Too many awards in the art field. Perception based recognition, not an evidence or work based one. Emotional Intelligence. Social Position in your societies. Having all the things people perceive as "high" in value. Good oratory and emotional manipulative skills. Giving donations and funds for the 'award giving work'.

These are the things we observe that get these unworthy people so many awards in a year.

Science is different. Let me explain. Many here don't give much importance to these things. When I got the National Award, many of my colleagues said, "you got the award? Good, congratulations. Now get back to work. We still have lots of work to do".

That's it! I didn't celebrate it. No parties, and no great feelings.

We just think about the work we still have to do and move on.

If we get recognition, that will make our work easier. That's it. We don't expect much.

Yes, there are people in science, who behave like people of art. But they are very rare and undoubtedly do get more recognition than other people in the field.

In science, the awards and recognition too are less when compared to art.

One of my colleagues says: Scientists do all the good and hard work but all the awards are stolen by the art people.

That sums up everything. Just grin and bear it.

By the way, I like and respect Dr. Tessy Thomas very much. She is one person who really deserves recognition.

* The Matthew effect of accumulated advantage, described in sociology, is a phenomenon sometimes summarized by the adage that "the rich get richer and the poor get poorer."

https://kkartlab.in/group/some-science/forum/topics/qs-on-science-a...

Permalink Reply by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on October 8, 2024 at 1:21pm

----

Scientists propose a new bias: The tendency to assume one has adequate information to make a decision

They call it the illusion of information adequacy

New experimental data support the idea that people tend to assume the information they have is adequate to comprehend a given situation, without considering that they might be lacking key information.

When navigating alternative perspectives, people may demonstrate psychological biases that influence their ability to understand others' viewpoints. For instance, in the bias of naive realism, people presume their own subjective perspective is objective truth.

The illusion of information adequacy: the failure to consider the possibility that one might be missing key information.

Moreover, a subgroup of participants who later received the information they initially lacked tended to stick with their original decisions. Hmmm!

Scientists just shut their mouths and wonder how inadequate human perceptions are!

A major source of misunderstanding and conflict in our daily lives arises from this paradox: We know that, in theory, there are plenty of things that we don't know we don't know. Yet, in practice, we almost always behave as though we have adequate information to voice our opinions, make good decisions, and pass judgment on others. A little more intellectual humility about what we do and don't know would serve us well.

If you don't have this, scientists don't give a damn to your opinion or decision.

Now you know why we don't care much about your opinions, talk, decisions and judgements with regard to science.

The illusion of information adequacy, PLoS ONE (2024). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0310216

Qs on science and my replies to them - Part 108

Decision-making, belief, and behavioral biases

Social biases

Memory errors and biases

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People view rationality and reasonableness as distinct principles of judgment

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