Understanding Bias

What is Objective Observation?

Objective observation is just describing what happens without judgment. Sergeant Joe Friday, a character from the TV series Dragnet, was famous for saying “The facts, just the facts”. The facts are just the things that can be directly seen or heard. It is extremely difficult to do without subjective interpretations of those facts. We usually go immediately from those objective facts to our thoughts, opinions, assessments, appraisals, assumptions, conclusions, analyses, or feelings about those “facts”.

The more objectively we can observe and describe what we actually see and hear, the freer we become to effectively respond to the situation in the most productive way to accomplish our goals. When we can accurately understand the child’s purpose or motive for the behavior that’s not productive, we can not only efficiently handle the situation, but we can also help the child develop those ultimate long-term goals of growing into those qualities and characteristics that define a successful human being.

Why We Do This

Why Our Brains Take Shortcuts: The Science of Efficient Meaning-Making

Our brains are powerful, but they also operate under limits of time, energy, and processing capacity. From both evolutionary and neuroscientific perspectives, humans are designed to make sense of the world with as little effort as possible—without collecting every detail—because if we waited for perfection, we’d rarely act. These cognitive short-cuts (often called heuristics) allow us to draw conclusions, respond, and learn quickly, even when we have only partial raw data. In early childhood settings, this means that teachers, caregivers, and children themselves often make judgments or interpretations based on minimal cues: gestures, facial expressions, one or two utterances, or a scene of play. Understanding that this is a normal, built-in process helps us observe more carefully, check our assumptions, and design observation strategies that counteract the risk of misinterpretation.

The Research

Herbert A. Simon introduced the idea of bounded rationality, which recognizes that decision-makers (including children and adults) cannot consider all information under real-world constraints. Instead, they “sacrifice”—settle for “good enough” decisions based on limited information (Simon, 1957).Research by Gigerenzer and colleagues demonstrates that in many everyday tasks, simple heuristic strategies (using a few cues rather than all possible data) often perform as well as or better than complex calculations, particularly in uncertain conditions (Gigerenzer & Gaissmaier, 2011).

Neuroscience confirms that the brain processes meaning and value very quickly. For example, Johns Hopkins researchers found that the brain begins assigning value to visual information within 80 milliseconds, relying on patterns rather than waiting for full analysis (Milosavljevic et al., 2018). Similarly, a study from the University of Helsinki showed that when reading, the brain actively extracts the “essentials” and ignores redundant details, reducing cognitive load (Frömer et al., 2020). I have had fun demonstrating this in classes with an activity where I flashed cards with well known phrases like “Paris in the Springtime”, “Once Upon a Time”, and then something like “Read the between the lines” that was universally perceived as “Read between the lines” because we don’t perceive what we don’t expect to be there.

Brain imaging research demonstrates that regions such as the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and lateral prefrontal cortex activate more strongly when a person overrides a heuristic, or cognitive shortcut, response to engage in deliberate reasoning (Bago et al., 2019). This shows that these shortcuts are the default, while careful analysis requires extra effort.

Cognitive biases, often seen as “errors,” can also be understood as adaptive trade-offs: we gain speed and efficiency at the cost of occasional misjudgment. This perspective frames biases as natural by-products of efficient thinking rather than flaws in reasoning (Lieder & Griffiths, 2019).

Understanding Bias More Broadly

We all see the world from our own special personal point of view. We create our own subjective reality based on that viewpoint. There are lots of things that go into our filters, or the things that color and shape the way we see the world. Many times, a very objective reality can be interpreted very differently from two different perspectives.  Look at the picture below.

The person on the right is definitely seeing a nine, and the person on the left is definitely seeing a six. The objective reality, the paint that’s actually on the floor, is the same reality for both of them, but the meaning is different. The meaning they assign to their perceptions of the same reality is very different based on their point of view. That is just one example of how our brains work all the time.

There’s a very famous story of six blind men who are asked to describe an elephant, and one says, “Oh, it’s like a rope.” And another says, “No, it’s like a wall.” A third says, “No, it’s like a tree.” Of course, they were all touching different parts of the elephant. They are not perceiving the whole objective reality, but different parts of that objective reality. This is something we all do continuously.

Some bias is explainable by the cognitive shortcuts our brains do automatically. Much of it, however, is developed to defend and protect our preferences, our values, and our interests. Part of what accomplishes this is that we tend to automatically, selectively perceive “facts” that support our beliefs and prior judgments.

The Confirmation Bias

Reality, the facts that we directly perceive, are represented by the circle on the left. There is only a portion of that, often a very small portion, that aligns with our expectations or beliefs. That’s the portion represented as orange. Most of the things that would confirm our beliefs are not found in the objective reality. We unconsciously overvalue the bits of reality that fit with our view of the world and undervalue facts that are inconsistent.

Bias Variables

Think about how this confirmation bias can interfere with our accurate perception of the facts. Imagine a situation where you go out on the playground and see “Johnny” raising his hand above a group of other students who are gathered around him. You have been working with “Johnny,” who is often impulsively violent with peers because of his ADHD. There are a lot of facts to that situation, right? You don’t know what is happening, but seeing Johnny’s hand being raised confirms your belief that he’s about to strike somebody. And because he, in your expectations, is always the one causing trouble, you don’t see the rest of the facts; that somebody is saying, “Who wants to go play kickball?” Or Johnny is saying, “My dad was in court, and he had to raise his hand like this when he had to testify. We take a small thing and we blow it up, and that’s all we see. We don’t see the rest of the objective reality that is right there in front of us.

Confirmation bias describes the reality that we have a tendency to search for things that confirm our beliefs about things, and we discredit, or just don’t acknowledge, the things that don’t fit with our expectations. It’s related to the concept of cognitive dissonance that a famous psychologist, Festinger (1957), talked about. When we have experiences where reality doesn’t match our expectations of it, it causes dissonance, it causes a problem. And if we can’t change our beliefs because of our strong attachment to them, or again, partly because of our cultural emphasis that we should be better than others, that we should always be right, then we have to change what we think we’re seeing. Our brains are remarkably capable of twisting the facts to fit what we want to be the reality. That’s way too obvious, of course, right now in our divisive political discourse. What people call “Fake News” is almost always that reality stuff that people don’t want to see.

References

1. Festinger, L. (1957). A theory of cognitive dissonance. Stanford University Press.
2. Frömer, R., Maier, M., & Abdel Rahman, R. (2020). Group membership and emotional face perception: Evidence from event-related brain potentials. Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience, 20(3), 631–647. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13415-020-00788-4
3. Gigerenzer, G., & Gaissmaier, W. (2011). Heuristic decision making. Annual Review of Psychology, 62(1), 451–482. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-120709-145346
4. Lieder, F., & Griffiths, T. L. (2019). Resource-rational analysis: Understanding human cognition as the optimal use of limited computational resources. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 43, e1. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X1900061X
5. Mikkelson, B., & Mikkelson, D. (2002, March 29). Dragnet: ‘Just the Facts, Ma’am’. Snopes. Retrieved from https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/just-the-facts/
6. Milosavljevic, M., Navalpakkam, V., Koch, C., & Rangel, A. (2018). Relative visual saliency differences induce sizable bias in consumer choice. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 28(2), 256–268. https://doi.org/10.1002/jcpy.1038
7. Simon, H. A. (1957). Models of man: Social and rational. Wiley.