Peer Reviewed Biased Story

Bias notes on Can Self-interest be a good thing?

I wrote a story about how Self-interest will bring benefit to nation's economy. I gave it to other classmates to analyze for biases.

they told my I'm unfair in some ways:
1. Bias by omission: I omitted moral side on my writing. I did not say anything about self-interest might lead people to do immoral things such as corruption. In addition, a self interested person might try to reach their ambitions in dirty ways.

2.Bias by selection of source: I mentioned Adam Smith, Father of Economics as a witness for my writing because I am curious about some ideas of his book, " The Wealth of Nation".

3.Bias by spin: I explain that self-interest is natural. It could be a good thing because people will develop their ability to conquer their goals. In fact, self-interest could be a bad thing for those people who care about moral sentiment in society.

The Implicit Association Test and The Political Compass Test: Capital is power!

The Implicit Association Test helped us to study implicit biases inside our mind but The Political Compass Test told us our points of political ideology.

The Implicit Association Test (IAT) is the project system that shows pictures and words. it will appear one by one and we just press our side automatically on the keyboard.

The Political Compass Test has six pages of questions. It uses ideology statements and test takers have to answer on a scale from Strong Agree to Strong Disagree.

I took Gender-Science. My result for Gender-Science suggested that I prefer women with science over man with liberal-art.

The Political Compass Test placed me in Authoritarian Right.

I believe that I wouldn't have biases on Men-Women with science. It might be  past experience affects my mind. I never studied with male teacher in primary school. For the result of Political Compass test, I didn't surprise that I received Authoritarian Right because I'm passionately curious about economics. I created my Facebook fan page about economics and finance for Lao people since last February. I also believe that the strong military will make a country become more powerful.

I didn't found connection of my biases and my political ideology. I suppose it couldn't relate to each other.

If you interest in The Implicit Association Test, then click this link:
https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/education.html

If you take The Political Compass Test, click the link below:
https://www.politicalcompass.org/test

If you want to read my posts, just like this page:
https://www.facebook.com/clumsyeconomist

1st News Article Discussion

For the first news discussion, I presented about "Mercedes-Benz is making a deep partnership with Baidu, China's Google" from Business Insider. Daimler and Chinese tech giant Baidu announced their tie-up on 25 May 2015 at consumer electronics show CES in Shanghai. The Mercedes-Benz cars will include Baidu software that allows users to access content from their smartphones  via their dashboards such as music and Internet services. the author commented  that it has become three-way race between German carmakers Daimler, BMW and Volkswagen.

Simon presented an article about Sepp Blatter is arrested. He point out The FIFA president tried to win the new election by corruption and Blatter is being investigated by US authorities.

Do cognitive biases influence our decision?

Recent week, I read an article about cognitive biases. If you want to know more, try this link:   http://io9.com/5974468/the-most-common-cognitive-biases-that-prevent-you-from-being-rational

I concentrate on last three biases: Projection Bias, The Current Moment Bias and Anchoring Effect. I found Anchoring Effect is more interesting than those two. I’d like to clarify about Anchoring Effect because it impacts our decision in everyday life but we don’t often notice it.

The author describes that Anchoring Effect appear when we fixate on a value or number than in turn gets compare to everything else.  The author points out the classic example that when we go to a restaurant we tend to see the difference in price before choose the middle option – Not too expensive, Not too cheap. It’s because our mind has create our own standard from the first information and anchored it. So every time that we’re making our decision, this bias will appear and tend to control our decision.

From my personal experience, I notice when my friend went to a sport store to buy a new football boots. It was 700,000 kip and he could negotiate for 600,000 kip. He was happy with that deal, His anchoring effect worked! For me, I think that Anchoring Effect influences almost my decisions and I can’t avoid it.

In conclusion, Cognitive biases influence our everyday decision. It’s good to understand how cognitive biases affect our thinking. I’ve never known we all have those biases in our attitude until I read this article. Now I know all of cognitive biases, maybe I might find a way to avoid from some terrible biases.

   

Media1A 2015, 1st Blog Post

Kittiya (Ton)
Classical economics
Fire Dragon