The role of bias and perspective in our decision making theory.
Decisions are often the hardest things to make, especially when it’s a choice between where one should be and where one wants to be. At times it becomes difficult to produce an objective overview of any situation where our own beliefs, values and desires are involved. It is then, that we as humans manage to confuse our decision making system in order to fit our perspective and biases in.
For ages, numerous people have attempted to decipher the true meaning of objective knowledge and have in turn come up with the result that no such thing exists. Any incident has more than one side and view to it. For instance, if we take the Great War as an example, that too holds knowledge that is in fact subjective. Our textbooks provide us with the perspective of only one side. While the other is left out. However, this side is also crucial in providing us with the truth and an objective overview. The Union Jack tells us a story where the Germans where the villains, that is subjective to only one side and until one does not take into account the German story, an objective view cannot be provided.
However, some might say that scientific knowledge is purely objective, and it is an objective description of the real structure of the world. But the recent philosophical insight into the nature of science gives us a different idea in this regard. Scientists are men and social beings; therefore, no scientist is beyond his psychology, ideology and sociology which have significant impact on his thought. All these factors produce influences over scientific decisions, such as decisions about when a phenomenon is recognised as a problem, what the methods are for solving the problem, what the methods are for justification, how different theories are to be compared, when the research comes to end, etc. This line of investigation will clearly show that scientific knowledge possesses one kind of subtle subjectivity in its nature.
Apart from this, even though ones perspective and biases do in fact alter their decision hold, the question arises as to what exactly encourages and affects the formation of these aforementioned perspectives. The point to that is the person’s social, economical, cultural and even intellectual location. To begin with, it is often noticed that a social hierarchy exists where not everyone is equally placed. This pressures the decisions of the people the people higher up in the order as they might not want to associate of come in contact with people considered “below” them. This not only affects the person’s perspectives, but also encourages a sharp degrading touch to their behaviour. The same goes for the economically well placed people and the people that are considered to have a higher intellect. For them, associating with people poorer or less intelligent than them is at times seen as demeaning.While on the other hand, the cultural aspect consists of many biases. These could be based on a number of areas ranging from racial to even religious discrimination, where some people are considered lower than others, which once more affects the perceptions that people and changes the very basis of their decisions.
Therefore, in conclusion, It is safe to say that perspectives along with biases do actually play a role of importance in influencing and affecting the way we make our day to day decisions and the thought that goes into taking those decisions.
