My Journey Through Bias Experience: A Personal Reflection
Writing a bias experience essay would offer a great opportunity for me to reflect on various stages of my life where I have encountered confirmation bias. From being a student to a working professional, I have experienced instances where I let my beliefs and ideas shape the way I perceive information. One such experience was when I was working on a team project and my initial idea was rejected by my colleagues. Instead of considering their suggestions, I became more fixed on my original plan, only to later realize that their ideas were better suited for the project. Through writing this essay, I could explore how biases can have a significant impact on our thoughts and decision-making processes, and how we can learn to recognize and overcome them in order to make more informed choices.
Another example of that I never imagined it could be confirmation bias was during my childhood. When I was small I used to spent most of my time with my cousins (mostly boys) and obviously boys are mostly messy and unorganized, so maybe that is why my mom catalog me as a messy kid. Most of the time I could say my mom was i a decent status. But sometimes it really frustrated me that my mom would always pick out and noticed the instances when my room was a mess but never acknowledge when I spent the day cleaning it. So, the result is that my mom was looking for evidence to support her already thesis that I was a messy kid. A notion of confirmation bias that comes to up in my head is the Rolling Stone magazine’s false story. “A Rape on Campus” that was published on November 19th 2014. I saw this story when I was on the research of sexual assault and I believe is an example of confirmation bias. It starts by the author with the belief that a rape happened at school and the professors were evil and the victim woes were made worse. Throughout her interviews and investigations, the author was only based on information that validated her initial viewpoint and discarded clues that created that possibility that the rape, in fact, was never true. As well, she never looked to interview the aggressors. Two interviewed students also expressed, embarrassment when they described the author as the “lady on a mission”. In the end, the whole situation turned to be out fake and the magazine was forced to pay millions of dollars in lawsuits.
Furthermore, I experienced this confirmation bias a couple weeks back when one of my closest friends and i went out for dinner and were having a great time. Suddenly, I made a comment about what she was telling me and I'm guessing she did not like it. The next day she did not answer my text back and by this time she had her own confirmation bias going on. Maybe she interpreted the comment I said that has nothing to do with what I meant, but she isn't willing to give me a chance to explain, because she is convinced what she thinks is the truth. I doesn’t matter what i say in the text messages because of her confirmation bias she continues to hear my words as meaning to what she already things they mean, not what I want them to mean.
Another term that I find really interesting is hindsight bias. Hindsight bias is a term in psychology that explains the tendency of people that overestimate their ability to predict an outcome that could possibly not be predicted. It the “I knew it all along” effect. Divorce is a great example of a time where we fail to predict the future and the couple getting a divorce can see the all the signs of trouble they didn't process in the fog of love. You can also see it in families, for example, you become a successful Preschool teacher. Your relatives might start using hindsight bias and say that they knew all along that you would become a great teacher. They would use old information of when they would see your love for kids since you were young as a predictor to your career.
Another great example is on sports. If it’s a win or a loose, you'll find a reason to justify how you knew all along that the result was going to happen. Say that your team won, you would say that you knew all along that they were going to win because of whatever reason. On the other hand, if your team lost, you would come out with reasons why you knew all along. As a result, we’ve experienced this biases throughout our lives. We also need to be more aware of the decisions that we take.
