Biased Assimilation

tags

Cognitive Bias

Lord: "Biased assimilation occurs when perceptions of new evidence are interpreted in such a way as to be assimilated into preexisting assumptions and expectation."

There are some strategies for mitigating biased assimilation

Notes on Lord

Biased assimilation occurs when perceptions of new evidence are interpreted in such a way as to be assimilated into preexisting assumptions and expectations

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acting as though one’s assumptions and expectations are correct is generally more adaptive than acting as though one’s assumptions and expectations might be wrong

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college students behaved more negatively toward a graduate assistant merely because they had previously been treated poorly by a different person who happened to wear her hair in the same style

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The ‘halo effect’ is a particularly robust form of over-generalization

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Assumptions and expectations tend to take precedence when there is no actual object to perceive

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The perceptual system relies on assumptions and expectations to make sense of an inherently ambiguous world

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partisans on both sides of the issue accepted the methodological rigor of whichever study had supported their own opinions, and yet found serious flaws in the methodology of whichever study’s results contradicted their own opinions

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the participants reported having adopted even more extreme opinions than they had held before the experiment began

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new evidence can get assimi- lated into preexisting assumptions and expectations and be perceived as supportive even when it is not

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People are pragmatists. They are not as concerned with learning the truth about the ‘real’ world as they are with making decisions that will have the least harmful conse- quences if the decision proves wrong

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Assumptions and expectations, which are so readily activated, carry with them a presumption of truth

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When people honestly believe that they are perceiving reality accurately, they are genuinely surprised to learn that other people have been exposed to the same evi- dence and yet arrived at conclusions different from their own

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conclude quite reasonably that people who regard the evidence as neither supporting nor opposing them must be bending over backwards to favor a perspective opposite to their own

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told the experimenter that they feared they might be biased in their evaluations of studies that contradicted their opinions, so they took extra care to be completely fair and unbiased. They claimed to have bent over backwards to give the contradictory study every possible benefit of doubt

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merely exhorting participants to be fair and unbiased might have little or no effect on the tendency toward biased assimilation

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cast themselves in the role of a judge or juror when reading the two death penalty studies. As predicted, these heavy-handed instructions did nothing to alter biased assimilation

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think about what their evaluation of each study’s methodology would have been had they known in advance that the study had produced outcomes

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consider the opposite technique eliminated both biased eval- uations and attitude polarization

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To reduce biased assimilation, it seems sufficient merely to have participants entertain any alternative

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Biased assimilation can be reduced, then, by directing people toward cognitive strategies that they would not likely have discovered or implemented on their own

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People do not display biased assimilation of new evidence when, before encountering that new evidence, they first get an opportunity to portray themselves in very positive ways

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sense of safety that allows them to at least consider alternative possibilities

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epistemic and teleologic strategies that have been comprehensively reviewed by Maio & Thomas

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