- Bias is a tendency to believe that some people, ideas, etc., are better than others, which often results in treating some people unfairly.
- Explicit bias refers to attitudes and beliefs (positive or negative) that we consciously or deliberately hold and express about a person or group. Explicit and implicit biases can sometimes contradict each other.
- Implicit bias includes attitudes and beliefs (positive or negative) about other people, ideas, issues, or institutions that occur outside of our conscious awareness and control, which affect our opinions and behavior. Everyone has implicit biases—even people who try to remain objective (e.g., judges and journalists)—that they have developed over a lifetime. However, people can work to combat and change these biases.
- Confirmation bias, or the selective collection of evidence, is our subconscious tendency to seek and interpret information and other evidence in ways that affirm our existing beliefs, ideas, expectations, and/or hypotheses. Therefore, confirmation bias is both affected by and feeds our implicit biases. It can be most entrenched around beliefs and ideas that we are strongly attached to or that provoke a strong emotional response.
Credit: Facing History
Online Resources
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All Sides
AllSides strengthens our democratic society with balanced news, diverse perspectives, and real conversation.
We expose people to information and ideas from all sides of the political spectrum so they can better understand the world — and each other. Our balanced news coverage, media bias ratings, civil dialogue opportunities, and technology platform are available for everyone and can be integrated by schools, nonprofits, media companies, and more. -
Media Bias/Fact Check
The most comprehensive media bias resource on the internet. There are currently 3500+ media sources listed in our database and growing every day. Don’t be fooled by Fake News sources. Use the search feature above (Header) to check the bias of any source. Use name or URL.
Recommended Reading
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A Finder's Guide to FactsNPR
Provides tips for identifying reliable news information. -
Would you notice if fake news changed your behavior? An experiment on the unconscious effects of disinformationA growing literature is emerging on the believability and spread of disinformation, such as fake news, over social networks. However, little is known about the degree to which malicious actors can use social media to covertly affect behavior with disinformation. A lab-based randomized controlled experiment was conducted with 233 undergraduate students to investigate the behavioral effects of fake news. It was found that even short (under 5-min) exposure to fake news was able to significantly modify the unconscious behavior of individuals. This paper provides initial evidence that fake news can be used to covertly modify behavior, it argues that current approaches to mitigating fake news, and disinformation in general, are insufficient to protect social media users from this threat, and it highlights the implications of this for democracy. It raises the need for an urgent cross-sectoral effort to investigate, protect against, and mitigate the risks of covert, widespread and decentralized behavior modification over online social networks.
Lesley University Counseling Center :
The Lesley University Counseling Center provides individual short-term counseling and services for on-campus undergraduate and graduate students in degree-granting programs. Our counselors are sensitive to issues of ethnicity, spirituality, culture, sexual orientation, gender, disability, learning differences, and body image. We offer traditional verbal therapy and non-traditional methods, such as expressive arts therapies.
Counseling sessions are held in confidence and are not part of your academic record. If you need or want long-term counseling, we can refer you to outside specialists. Students are responsible for the cost of outside services How to make an appointment: We are offering remote counseling services. To make an appointment: Email counselingcenter@lesley.edu to let us know you want to meet with a counselor. You can also use this email for other questions you may have. Call 617-349-8545 and leave a voicemail and we'll get back to you.
Call to Safety approaches domestic and sexual violence intervention and prevention work through a social justice and anti-oppressive lens. We communicate this value through community outreach, continuous training and education for our staff, and by applying anti-oppression theory into our Basic Advocacy Training for incoming volunteers. In the interest of joining the movement for racial justice, Call to Safety recently took on the effort to become an anti-racist organization. We recognize that as we live in a culture that is supported by white supremacy, our work towards racial justice will be on-going and in a constant state of becoming. We welcome feedback from the community at large about how we might better work towards this goal.