To answer this question we must first analyse and define the key terms in the statement. “Check” can be defined as to validate or to verify. Our “instinctive judgements” can be defined as our innate knowledge, or the judgements reached without conscious reasoning. Instinctive judgement can be taken to mean “intuition”. In this case it may be helpful to rewrite the central knowledge question as: To what extent can ways of knowing verify whether our instinctive judgements are valid? I believe that our ways of knowing help form our instinctive judgements, but are also used to verify that they are valid. To examine this question, I will consider whether instinctive judgements are themselves ways of knowing, whether instinctive judgements are reliable …show more content…
Instinctive judgements may be a combination of emotion and perception. For example, it is our instinct to trust people we are emotionally attached to: Julie Baumeister, wife of serial killer Herb Baumeister, never considered that her husband could be a murderer, even after finding a human skeleton buried in her garden. He told her that the bones were from a medical school skeleton - and it was her instinctive judgement to believe him (Grant, 2013). Our past experiences and memories, gained through sense perception, could form and change our instinctive judgements. ‘Instrumental learning’ is a type of learning present in animals; animals will remember the outcomes of previous situations and modify their future instinctive responses to cohere with these past outcomes. A positive outcome, such as finding food, will reinforce an instinctive behaviour, while a negative outcome, such as pain, will decrease the chance of a response occurring (Meyer, …show more content…
Bias and prejudice play a role in our instinctive judgements as they affect our subconscious decision making process. Studies have shown that doctors are more likely to recommend unnecessary surgery for racial minorities, due to ‘implicit bias’ or subconscious racism that affects our instinctive judgements (Viskontas and Mooney, 2014). This perspective suggests that verifying instinctive judgements using ways of knowing is similar to the scientific method; innate intuition is combined with evidence from reason and sense perception to confirm our instinctive judgements, or hypotheses. Robert Heller recommends that we should "never ignore a gut feeling, but never believe that it 's enough" (McKenzie,
After reading See No Bias by Shankar Vedantam I have learned that many people are unaware their biases. Mahzarin Banaji took a bias test, now known as the Implicit Association Test and her results stated she had a biased for whites over blacks. She didn’t understand her results because she is a minority too. She did an experiment where she had people picking from a list of unknown names. “The experiment showed how subtle cues can cause errors without people 's awareness.” Millions of people have taking the bias test and large majorities of people showed biases, even if they said they had no biases. The results also showed that minorities had the same biases as the majority groups. For example, “Some 48 percent of blacks showed a pro-white or anti-black bias; 36 percent of Arab
Blindspot, authors Mahzarin R. Banaji and Anthony G. Greenwald reveal how people formulate decisions and judgments automatically based on their exposure to cultural attitudes regarding age, gender, race, ethnicity, social class, religion, disability status, and nationality. They claim a section of our brain, a“blind spot,” is responsible for storing the hidden biases that lead us to select choices and decisions in our life. Furthermore, the authors aim to unfold the scientific logic of their analysis of the effects of hidden biases so people will be “better able to achieve the alignment,” between their behavior and intentions (Banaji and Greenwald, 2013) preface
The hidden bias test by Project Implicit was interesting method of determining hidden biases. A hidden bias is, “Biases thought to be absent or extinguished remain as "mental residue" in most of us.”(Teaching Tolerance, 2014). Studies have shown a link between biases and behavior and biases can be revealed through an individual’s actions. If biases are revealed through actions then they must be learned. Teaching Tolerance indicates, “Bias is perpetuated by conformity with in-group attitudes and socialization by the culture at large.” (Teaching Tolerance, 2014). This perspective supports the belief which biases are learned and never forgotten and reestablished through behavior. My perception of biases is they are formed through experiences not group conformity. Culture is important influence in forming biases, yet biases can change. According to Teaching Tolerance, even if a bias still changes it lingers in the unconscious. An interesting perspective, biases continue to stay with each of us even if we think it is hidden.
Implicit and explicit biases are related mental constructs. For many years, even dating back to our great’s ancestor, people always have automatic judge people, places, and things. We were all given five senses, knowing how the brain works, we choose to use our conscious actions to judge. Without awareness, we usually act on those judgments. There are two types of judgments consciously and unconsciously.
The human mind is one of the most complex structures the gods had created. It is difficult to understand each brain process as every human being possesses his or her own distinguished thought patterns with different levels of complexities. A person’s mind greatly influences his behavior, which eventually transforms into his habit by becoming embedded into his character. Today, the world of psychology tries to understand everything that a mind can create. However, even before the field of Psychology was introduced and brought into practice, some American writers threw a spotlight on the mechanism of the human brain in their works. On top of this list is an American writer, Edgar Allan
The brain is one of the most complex as well as one of the most vital organs of the human body. It's utter perplexity still causes the most astound thinkers to step back and contemplate the way it works. Every second the brain processes four-hundred billion bits of information, while only two-thousand of those bits people become aware of. One can also observe that with so much information to process, there is a plethora of information in the world that can be obtained than what is actually being perceived. Unknowingly, people criticize others and make judgments without even being aware of their perception. Although it is said that one can acquire the skills to make judgments that are unbiased and are constructed of a wide range or base of background knowledge, one simply does not have the time to think about thinking. People instinctively judge others constantly by their mere appearance despite the fact that it is considered immoral. It is so common that one does not even realize when they are doing it. In the grocery store, at work, at school; No matter where one may be, they are making snap judgments. The irony and truth of the matter is that a majority of the time, those subconscious decisions or judgments that one makes and are unbeknownst to them are strangely correct. (Hirshon)
Pearsosn, H. (2013). Science and Intuition: Do both have a Place in Clinical Decision Making?
Learning can be quantified through observable behaviour and is adaptive to a creature’s specific environment at an individual level rather than species level. Behaviour can be broken down into two main categories, respondent behaviour, which is impacted by events that preceded it and operant behaviour, which is behaviour that is influenced by events that follow it. Behaviour can be analysed using a three term contingency of ABC. A is the antecedent, which can increase or decrease a behaviour depending on what is desired, B is the observed behaviour and C is the consequence of that behaviour, certain consequences increase behaviour whilst some decrease it. There are many different ways we learn behaviour and many different types of conditioning. Operant conditioning influences operant behaviour and uses the principles of positive and negative reinforcement and punishment to strengthen desired behaviours whereas instrumental conditioning involves making a response that is instrumental, it is an activity that is voluntary which elicits a consequence. A third type of conditioning is classical conditioning, which can be defined as an association being made between one stimulus and another, resulting in a relationship. For the purpose of this essay, classical conditioning will be the focus.
Physicians routinely make crucial decisions about medical care for patients whose lives hang in the balance. In the face of such high stakes, it may be surprising to think that automatic associations can unknowingly bias professional decision-making. One study compared implicit racial bias between White American doctors and Black American doctors and found that “African American doctors, on average, did not show an implicit preference for either Blacks or Whites…” The implicit racial biases of White physicians also seem to play a role in predicting how positively or negatively Black patients respond to the medical interaction (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19648715) (Penner, Dovidio, West, Gaertner, Albrecht, Daily, & Markova, 2010), (Penner, L., Dovidio, J., West, T., Gaertner, S., Albrecht, T., Dailey, R., & Markova, T. (2010). Aversive racism and medical interactions with Black patients: A field study- Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 46, 436-440). Organizations can do many things like providing training implicit bias and diversity; seek to identify consciously the differences between different groups and individuals; and increasing emphasis on the education of social issues such as stereotyping and
at this moment in time, I learned how my own biases affected my patient care. In the ever
When children are exposed to discriminative behaviour at school, they become withdrawn and not valued. This theory centres on the behaviour and actions of the social environment children are exposed to at school. The most noted discriminative behaviours children are confronted with are a negative demeanour towards gender, culture, skin colour, dress and appearance. However, with a positive environment of acceptance for all people from an early age, children learn to value and respect themselves and each other.
Implicit bias has negatively impacted our society, whether we realize it or not. Efren Perez(2016), a professor at Vanderbilt University, defines implicit bias as “an umbrella term for a variety of attitudes, beliefs, knowledge and stereotypes that we all carry to some degree. They tend to be automatically triggered, hard to control and can often influence what we say and do without our awareness” (para. 3). This has a negative impact on society because it can influence our viewpoints on important issues such as immigration, politics, and civil rights no matter how unbiased we think we are. Pérez(2016) explains “our mind picks up on patterns that we see in society, the media and other places and forms snap judgments before we have time to process all the information in a more deliberative and controlled manner” (para. 4). While we may not always view ourselves as prejudice or racist, implicit bias lies beneath the surface of our conscious and affects how we make
What is unconscious bias? When asked this question, many people are hesitant to respond or they may not know the answer. But, it is quite simple. Unconscious bias can be defined as biases that we have but are not fully aware of. It becomes just “something we do,” essentially, it has been normalized and it is something rooted in our brains. Many times unconscious bias can also be referred to as implicit bias. There are many ways to define what this simple phrase means but, the best definition comes from the Kirwan Institute. The Kirwan Institute describes implicit/unconscious bias as “the attitudes or stereotypes that affect our understanding, actions, and decisions in an unconscious manner” (). Essentially, we may not know that we are being biased towards a certain person or group of people in our everyday lives. Many times this kind of behavior can find its way into the workplace and we being to make unconscious judgements about the employees that we work with on a day to day basis. With that being said, all members of society should work to defeat unconscious bias and I believe that starting with the workplace will help to make it a habit in our lives.
The way that each individual interprets, retrieves, and responds to the information in the world that surrounds you is known as perception. It is a personal way of creating opinions about others and ourselves in everyday life and being able to recognize it under various conditions. Each person’s perceptions are used as a kind of filter that every piece of information has to pass through before it determines the effect that it has or will have on the person from the stimulus. It is convincing to believe that we create multiple perceptions about different situations and objects each day. Perceptions reflect our opinions in many ways. The quality of a person’s perceptions is very important and can affect the response that is given through different situations. Perception is often deceived as reality. “Through perception, people process information inputs into responses involving feelings and action.” (Schermerhorn, et al.; p. 3). Perception can be influenced by a person’s personality, values, or experiences which, in turn, can play little role in reality. People make sense of the world that they perceive because the visual system makes practical explanations of the information that the eyes pick up.
Learning is defined as a “process of change that occurs as a result of an individual’s experience” (Mazure, 2006). Researchers assume that the process of learning follows certain general principles, which were developed, into the general process learning theories. These include operant conditioning and classical conditioning which has been put forward by leading psychologists like Pavlov, B.F.Skinner and Thorndike. However, in learning, operant and classical conditoning are opposed by biological constraints that state that there are limitations to the theories. Some of these biological constraints on learning will be discussed below.