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Bias Facts & Worksheets

Bias can be described as prejudice in favor of or against one thing, person, or group compared with another, and is generally regarded as unfair.

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Bias is primarily defined as prejudice in favor of or against one thing, person, or group compared with another, which is usually, in a way, considered to be unfair.

See the fact file below for more information on Bias, or you can download our 23-page Bias worksheet pack to utilize within the classroom or home environment.

Key Facts & Information

DEFINITION OF BIAS

  • Bias is a disproportionate preference for or opposition to an idea or object, typically in an unreflective, prejudiced, or unfair manner. 
  • It also refers to predisposition, frequently in a way that is viewed as unjust, that is held either in favor of or against a certain product, person, or group in comparison to others.

NEGATIVE CONNOTATION

  • A cognitive prejudice known as the negativity bias causes negative occurrences to have a greater psychological impact than happy ones. Even when negative and positive occurrences are of equal size, negativity bias still exists, making humans more sensitive to negative events.
  • According to research, this bias for the negative begins to develop throughout infancy. Infants under a year old tend to pay more attention to pleasant facial expressions and vocal tones, but this tendency starts to change as they become older.
  • It explains why, even when they are of similar proportion, negative experiences or feelings often have a greater impact on a person’s psychological condition than happy ones.
  • Loss aversion, a cognitive bias that explains why the pain of losing is psychologically twice as strong as the joy of winning, is closely related to negativity bias.

NEGATIVE POTENCY

  • Positive and unpleasant events or memories may be of similar quantity or emotionality, but they may not all be equally vivid, according to the concept of negative potency. 
  • The closer one approaches the affective event itself, the more negative events are expected to be regarded as being increasingly more negative than happy events are thought to be increasingly positive. In other words, negativity is steeper than positivity.

NEGATIVE DOMINANCE

  • Positive and bad occurrences often slant towards a pessimistic perception known as negative dominance. Contrary to the actual average total of our positive and negative components is an overall negative interpretation.

NEGATIVE DIFFERENTIATION

  • According to the theory of negative differentiation, as negative occurrences are inherently more intricate than their positive equivalents, dealing with them requires a greater mobilization of cognitive resources. 
  • This makes dealing with the experience more intense and memorable.

EFFECTS OF NEGATIVE BIAS

  • Human decision-making, self-motivation, interpersonal relationships, and other activities are included in the instances of how negativity bias affects people.
  • People who suffer from negativity bias will frequently overestimate or place an excessive emphasis on a decision’s prospective costs or drawbacks. Poor decision-making may result from skewing risk and potential negative outcomes.
  • Furthermore, it is challenging for people to share accurate information due to their biased thinking. 
  • It can cause someone to shun information they dislike and make them blind to knowledge that might produce a more accurate result.
  • According to a psychological study, negative bias affects one’s motivation and capacity to finish activities.
  • When humans are working to prevent losing something, they are known to be more driven than when we are working to obtain something. 
  • The degree to which humans are motivated to perform a task can vary depending on whether an action is placed in a positive or negative perspective.

IS THERE A POSITIVE BIAS?

  • Positive bias, in its least contentious and most phenomenological sense, refers to a tendency for people to view the world favorably. 
  • The tendency to interpret, view, and remember reality favorably can be characterized as positivity bias.
  • It includes a propensity to approach unknown objects, such as people, situations, events, and life in general, with positive rather than neutral expectations.
  • This is true to the extent that their positive judgments faithfully represent genuinely held positive views.

OPTIMISM BIAS

  • Optimism bias describes a person’s propensity to overestimate the likelihood of happy occurrences occurring and underestimate the likelihood of bad events occurring. 
  • Relative optimism and unrealistic optimism are other names for it. It is typical for optimism bias to cut across gender, ethnicity, nationality, and age.

INFORMATION PROCESSING

  • People who process information irrationally or illogically are said to have information processing biases. 
  • Positivity bias is a term used to describe an imbalance in how people process information. 
  • It describes a propensity for people to overemphasize positive information while neglecting negative information, to give more weight to positive information when forming general impressions, and to assign one-sided moral, social, or other attributes.

PUBLICATION BIAS

  • An example of publishing bias is the positive-results bias, which happens when writers are more inclined to submit positive results than negative or ambiguous results, or when editors are more likely to accept favorable results.
  • The file-drawer effect, often known as the file-drawer problem, is another name for publication bias. This phrase implies that findings contradicting researchers’ theories frequently remain in their file cabinets, biasing subsequent research that is published.

MEDIA BIAS

  • When news organizations and journalists choose which events and stories to report and how to cover them, this is known as media bias. Rather than the viewpoint of a single journalist or article, the phrase “media bias” suggests a systemic or widespread bias that violates the rules of journalism.
  • Media bias could be applied in an instance wherein politics and media bias may have a mutually beneficial interaction; both the media and politicians may be able to sway one another.

HOW DO WE AVOID BEING BIASED?

  • There are a number of strategies for overcoming bias, one of which entails confronting negative self-talk and increasing self-awareness. One can learn to identify any thoughts they have during the day, whether or not they are useful, by checking in with themselves periodically. 
  • To determine what is helping them and what isn’t, they might also examine their own habits.
  • Being conscious of and actively controlling one’s emotions when making decisions is another strategy that can aid someone in reducing bias in their decisions. 
  • People frequently assume that their thoughts are automatically clouded by emotions, which leads to unintended bias and reduces the effectiveness of their decisions.
  • Meanwhile, an individual is affected by negativity bias when it causes us to feel or respond to unfavorable situations more intensely than happy ones. 
  • Focusing on good things and appreciating them to make good memories would be an exercise to overcome this bias.
  • When enjoying an experience, make an effort to totally immerse yourself in the pleasant feelings.

“It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into.”

― Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) Anglo-Irish satirist, author, essayist, political pamphleteer poet

  • Unconscious biases are formed by people based on a variety of social constructs, including race, gender, age, sexual orientation, marital status, and education. 
  • Additionally, people have a tendency to socialize more with their like-minded friends. 
  • By associating with individuals outside of their in-group, they can end this pattern. 
  • If a person wants to work to develop organic and genuine connections with those people, as opposed to relying on casual or infrequent contact, that interaction will have a lot higher impact.

Bias Worksheets

This fantastic bundle includes everything you need to know about Bias across 23 in-depth pages. These are ready-to-use worksheets that are perfect for teaching kids about Bias, which can be described as prejudice in favor of or against one thing, person, or group compared with another, and is generally regarded as unfair.

Complete List of Included Worksheets

Below is a list of all the worksheets included in this document.

  1. Bias Facts
  2. What is your Bias?
  3. Bias Comparison
  4. What I See
  5. Negative vs. Positive
  6. Gender Bias
  7. Golden Hammer
  8. Cognitive Bias
  9. Media Bias
  10. Social Biases
  11. Biased Quotes

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Link will appear as Bias Facts & Worksheets: https://kidskonnect.com - KidsKonnect, January 19, 2018

Use With Any Curriculum

These worksheets have been specifically designed for use with any international curriculum. You can use these worksheets as-is, or edit them using Google Slides to make them more specific to your own student ability levels and curriculum standards.

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