FALSE BALANCE BIAS — Take the American Version of This Test

Why Both-Sidism is Costing Us Our Soul

Add Your Own Title [A Rorschach test in a political cartoon; is this like supposed to represent what happens if the Klan was too successful and they find they have to do the work now?]

What is the Balance Bias? It is only of many biases that have been defined by psychologists as being something that guides our daily thinking. While there is no agreement on how many biases we have — I have about 26 on my list I’ve tracked — our mind loves to take shortcuts when interpreting the world.

These biases are something I also call ‘heuristics,” rough ideas that are rule based and influence our thinking. Again, that’s just my working definition of heuristics, which has its own definition and is an important step in the scientific process. What it means here is that the brain can make a rule through deducing events and experiences in our lives to help us interpret the flood of information always hitting our senses. Thus, in my personal belief, there is an unconscious set of rules that become activated by information and help us process the world.

A bias is also a rhetorical trick that pretends to present an unbiased viewpoint by the speaker. It can be deliberately or consciously employed, or semi-consciously employed, or even “programmed” into the mind. For example, a white cop in the Mississippi might see a black man and stop him to ask for papers or ID. He is “biased” in a programmed way to do so.