As human beings, our thought processes are not always the clearest or the a lot of rational. Psychologists have identified over 100 thinking biases. These range from the quirky (The ‘Benjamin Franklin Effect’ which states that, once someone does a favour for you, they are a lot more likely to do another) to the severe (‘The Pessimism Bias’ which is believing that bad things are a lot more likely to happen to you in the future’).
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But what are some of the most common biases in education? This blog looks at the five thinking biases that are prevalent in schools:
The Hawthorne Effect – This is named after an experiment at The Hawthorne Factory in America. keen to find out how their staff could be a lot more productive, the owners of the factory observed them. knowing that they were being watched, the employees worked much harder and productivity increased. When they were no longer being observed, productivity returned to normal rates.
This has some interesting implications for teacher observations, as it is tough to give someone feedback on how they are doing, if your mere presence alters how they go about doing their work. Likewise, if students are undergoing an intervention to Camiseta Selección de fútbol de Ecuador improve a particular area and they know they are part of an intervention, it will definitely impact their subsequent behaviour.
The Ikea effect – named after the Swedish department store, which requires you to spend hours (often far a lot more then you were hoping for) on assembling your flat-pack furniture. Researchers have found that people tend to place a disproportionately high value on the things they personally create. In reality, this indicates that if someone has an idea, and has serviced it, they are a lot more likely to cling to the notion that it as a result need to be a good idea.
This is similar to the ‘sunk cost fallacy’ which describes how people make future decisions based on how much effort they have put in previously, rather than how fruitful they may be in the future. It is akin to throwing good money after bad. In schools, this leads to failing methods and interventions being prolonged longer then they must be. teachers can secure themselves from this bias by knowing that just because it is your idea and you have put a lot of work into it, this doesn’t necessarily make it a good idea.
The Bandwagon effect – This describes how you are a lot more likely to believe in an idea if lots of other people already believe it. When so lots of people believe something, it is easy to opt for the flow. individual decision making and vital reasoning are abdicated in favour of the group, as you assume everyone else has done the thinking for you. This partially describes why neuromyths are so common in education.
Used wisely, this desire to follow the group can be a force for good. For example, a quirky study found that one of the most effective methods to get hotel guest to re-use their towels (and thus saving the hotel laundry costs) was to simply tell Camiseta Feyenoord them that everyone else is already doing it. This is the reason why some road signs now indicate what percentage of the population drive at the recommended speed limit, and not how lots of drive over it.
Teachers can inoculate themselves from the downside of the bandwagon effect by maintaining a healthy dose of scepticism on the current fad (at least until they have seen the evidence for themselves) and use it by actively highlighting and praising the group norms they want to see from their students with a view to others pupils following suit.
Confirmation Bias – this refers to the idea that people pay a lot more attention to ideas that they had previously agreed with. The confirmation bias is akin to starting with a conclusion and then trying to find and finding evidence that proves it to be true. This indicates we may struggle to see what is actually occurring. A terrific example of this is the video below. Can you figure out the rule?
This indicates that if we want a method to work, we typically look for proof that it does. Likewise, if we were to label a student as disruptive, we are a lot more likely to pay attention and remember the times they misbehave (and subconsciously disregard and forget the times they didn’t).
Students as well as teachers suffer from the confirmation bias. In Daniel T. Willingham’s exceptional book, When Can You depend on The Experts, he details a fascinating study in which half a class of students were told that their supply teacher was ‘rather cold, industrious, critical, functional and determined’. The other half were told the exact same sentence, except the words ‘rather cold’ were replaced with ‘very warm’. students who had expected to be taught by a Camiseta Cruz Azul warm teacher rated the supply teacher as much nicer and funnier than those who were expecting the teacher to be distant.
The Dunning Kruger Effect: This is potentially the most discouragingnull
