Social and Behavioral Science
120 Investigating the Perseverance and Bias Blind Spot Relationship
Jordan Davidson and Frank Drews (Psychology)
Faculty Mentor: Frank Drews (Psychology, University of Utah)
However, while cognitive biases are easy to intuit and detect in the motivations of the people around us, the same evidence of bias is no longer obviously apparent when one reflects on their own judgment and decision making. Engaging in meta-cognitive considerations, people tend to believe that their own perspective is uniquely objective and that those who disagree with their assertions are unilaterally biased, exhibiting a sort of “naïve realism” (Robinson et al., 1995).
This asymmetrical ability to perceive cognitive bias in the self versus others is known as the bias blind spot, and appears to be present in the majority of people (Pronin et al., 2002; 2004).
While the bias blind spot is pervasive, there are individual differences to what extent a person displays bias blind spot, i.e., some individuals with a bias blind spot believe more strongly that they are less biased than others while some believe they are only a little less biased than average (Scopelliti et al., 2015). While these individual differences are apparent throughout much of the research on bias blind spot, there is a perplexing lack of correlations between bias blind spot and various measures of cognitive sophistication (i.e., thinking dispositions and cognitive abilities) (West et al., 2012), personality, and self-evaluative measures (Scopelliti et al., 2015). Possibly motivated by the lack of correlational findings, research has focused more on the cognitive processes underlying bias blind spot.
The cognitive mechanisms that guide bias blind spot are not thought to be unidimensional. Instead, several contributors to its existence are discussed in the literature. Primarily, bias blind spot is believed to come from the “introspection illusion,” or a tendency to believe our own intuitions reveal objective insight for ourselves while others’ intuitions are riddled with bias (Pronin & Kugler, 2007). This belief leads to the aforementioned naïve realism bias, another potential process behind bias blind spot. Similarly, research has also shown that people tend to overemphasize their own intentions when self-evaluating while simultaneously ignoring the intentions of others when evaluating them (Kruger & Gilovich, 2004). While naïve realism and the introspection illusion are largely considered to be the main motivator behind bias blind spot, there is still the possibility that this metabias could also be—at least partially— explained in self-enhancing motivational terms (Pronin et al., 2002; West et al., 2012).
There are a number of ways that people exhibit other “positive illusions,” or unrealistically optimistic views of the self (Taylor & Brown, 1988). However, these illusions are not always detrimental, and have been argued by Taylor & Brown to foster positive mental health outco