Bias under the microscope

Xark friend, former reporter and university journalism instructor Ellen Meacham doesn't have a blog (yet -- hint, hint), but we benefit from that because she sends us cool stuff... like this WaPo story about a study on bias perception.

To test how different groups see the same story, a Sanford psychology professor showed six TV news reports from the 1982 Israeli-Lebanese war to 144 viewers.

Pro-Arab viewers heard 42 references that painted Israel in a positive light and 26 references that painted Israel unfavorably.

Pro-Israeli viewers, who watched the very same clips, spotted 16 references that painted Israel positively and 57 references that painted Israel negatively.

Both groups were certain they were right and that the other side didn't know what it was talking about.

But here's where it gets really interesting:

Were pro-Israeli and pro-Arab viewers who were especially knowledgeable about the conflict immune from such distortions? Amazingly, it turned out to be exactly the opposite, Stanford psychologist Lee D. Ross said. The best-informed partisans were the most likely to see bias against their side.

Ross thinks this is because partisans often feel the news lacks context. Instead of just showing a missile killing civilians, in other words, partisans on both sides want the news to explain the history of events that prompted -- and could have justified -- the missile. The more knowledgeable people are, the more context they find missing.

OK, so people see things differently, and intelligent, informed people draw those distinctions more sharply.  But why all the passion around this? One answer: Partisans seem to harbor a low opinion of non-partisans and their ability to evaluate information.

(Two separate researchers) both found that what partisans worry about the most is the impact of the news on neutral observers. But the data suggest such worry is misplaced. Neutral observers are better than partisans at seeing flaws and virtues on both sides. Partisans, it turns out, are particularly susceptible to the general human belief that other people are susceptible to propaganda.

"When you are persuaded by something, you don't think it is propaganda," Ross said. "Israelis know they see the world the way they do because they are Israelis, and Arabs, too. The difference is people think in their case, their special identities are a source of enlightenment, whereas other people's source of enlightenment is a source of bias."

How do I rate this information? Interesting but junky -- and, as presented in the WaPo online, utterly non-helpful to me as a user. No, a print story doesn't have room to provide all the boring internals from the experiments, but length isn't an issue on the Web. At a minimum, where are the links to the two studies? I'll have to do my own fact-checking if I want to form an independent opinion on the quality of the research, and that's annoying. But I digress...

Whatever the answer, understanding the human perception of bias is no small part of creating higher-quality news media -- not to mention improving our own individual understandings of the world. If I can't trust my own perceptions of things, I'm never going to make much progress.

Comments

[Anna Haynes]

Likewise (from an Oct 2004 comment in PressThink) -
"One famous psych study c 1951 showed students and Alum of Princeton and Dartmouth a film of a controversial game between P & D. It was a vicious game, lots of penalties. The loyalty of the viewers resulted in what can only be described as perceptions of a different game by Princeton fans and Dartmouth fans although they all saw identical footage."