Personal bias is our inbuilt reaction to events and situations
It comes from our previous life experiences. It’s a really interesting part of how our mind makes automatic decisions for us, without us necessarily realising.
I posted a set of Covid numbers, for the UK, onto Facebook, then sat back to see what would happen. Here’s the post and the figures:
“I think we’re becoming overrun with numbers. To the point where when a thousand people die, we’re like ‘so what’s for tea’. Ultimately these are probably all we really need to know – from the ONS. Stay safe everybody.” (ONS – Office for National Statistics).
So what I found really interesting is that depending on your ‘bias’ determined whether you thought the numbers showed Covid was killing lots of people or that it wasn’t killing many at all … from the same set of numbers!!! That doesn’t make anyone good or bad. It doesn’t even necessarily make people right or wrong – it just makes them bias. The great thing is – I’m just as bias as anyone else!!! I had my own interpretation of the numbers relevant to what I believe. Great to know that I’m as ‘normal’ as the next guy!
I was listening to the Simon Sinek Podcast and he was talking about bias. So say two people are trying to research a subject, one is politically to the left and one to the right. Depending what you’ve searched for previously, Google/ Yahoo etc will send you what it ‘thinks’ you want to see. So even if our two researchers are open minded, depending what they’ve been viewing will determine what they see. This re-enforces our personal bias. Facebook algorithms do the same. It’s all about getting your eyes on their site and so they feed all of us what we want to see.
Why is this important?
It’s really difficult to make informed choices when we’re being ‘fed’ information. Even if we are open minded and trying to look for unbiased information. For myself, I try to get information from lots of different sources, but ultimately I go with my feelings. I trust myself to make good choices and we often know what’s right and wrong, but don’t always follow that feeling. How many times have we said ‘”I shouldn’t have done that … I knew it didn’t feel right at the time!!!”.
Be prepared to go against the crowd and stay true to yourself. Be kind to yourself and others. And above all don’t let your personal bias lead you astray.
Love and peace.
Paul
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