Post by Baron von Lotsov on May 29, 2024 11:08:36 GMT
Confirmation bias is the tendency to search for, interpret, favour, and recall information in a way that confirms or supports one's prior beliefs or values. People display this bias when they select information that supports their views, ignoring contrary information, or when they interpret ambiguous evidence as supporting their existing attitudes. The effect is strongest for desired outcomes, for emotionally charged issues, and for deeply entrenched beliefs. Confirmation bias is insuperable for most people, but they can manage it, for example, by education and training in critical thinking skills.
Biased search for information, biased interpretation of this information, and biased memory recall, have been invoked to explain four specific effects:
attitude polarization (when a disagreement becomes more extreme even though the different parties are exposed to the same evidence)
belief perseverance (when beliefs persist after the evidence for them is shown to be false)
the irrational primacy effect (a greater reliance on information encountered early in a series)
illusory correlation (when people falsely perceive an association between two events or situations).
Biased search for information, biased interpretation of this information, and biased memory recall, have been invoked to explain four specific effects:
attitude polarization (when a disagreement becomes more extreme even though the different parties are exposed to the same evidence)
belief perseverance (when beliefs persist after the evidence for them is shown to be false)
the irrational primacy effect (a greater reliance on information encountered early in a series)
illusory correlation (when people falsely perceive an association between two events or situations).
Now the other day I notice another example of madness in the Daily Mail saying officers should not have to work weekends, but should be allowed to take naps on the job. Clearly on superficial inspection this seems both typical but completely stupid at the same time. As with every Mail story, this is the conclusion reached, but although one could not fault the conclusion, the issue here is lie by omission. The Mail has told you so much but left you pretty stupid yourself because you never have any idea how this could have manifested. If you don't know why, you can't hope to correct the problem, so you are left helpless like a leper. It's why you keep buying the rag because it is a hunger that is never satisfied.
I've seen the same problem many times and have done my own research, and by doing this I've noticed a commonality in these cases. Using this story as an example of many, I will explain what is most likely to caused it.
We are given the reference in the Mail article to a person by the name of Sophie Bostock PhD. Now she is clearly from academia and has a PhD, so has trained as a researcher in order to do research. You will see by other data that psychology is one of the top sciences studied at degree level in British universities. If you have one of these degrees then you can go into research and this is what she has done. She is an academic with a skill looking for an application for her skill such that she can get paid, as are all the researchers in any field.
While she is looking for work and looking for new discoveries in the field of psychology, over in a completely different block is PC Plod and his department who, like any typical government institution, have been told by central government to deliver more bang for the taxpayer's bucks. We have no issue so far, but like many government departments and managers in general it turns to a question of getting higher performance out of your workforce, and this is how we have one block looking for a solution and another block with solutions to sell. They meet and a deal is struck.
If you would like to see an example of this process of linking buyer with seller in government institutions, I strongly recommend looking this girl up in LinkedIn and just read what you see on the page in front of you, and then all will become crystal clear what generates the madness. Try putting yourself in her shoes.
I can't link to this page directly because the bastards want you to sign up to an account and agree to a rather long contract which I have no intention of agreeing to. Instead, with Linkedin you have to bring the page up by clicking on a Google search. This is so the page is included in Google search index, as per some sly engineering. So scroll down this list and then click on the Linkedin site and it should work.
I think if one were to apply some critical thinking to what is going on regarding the people who use this site then they one will see it is very relevant to the wiki quote above. In her case, as a psychology academic, the irony is rich.
