Source Of Bias Essay

Today, we will be talking about bias and how to assess it to reduce distortion of information or of behavior; which could be positive or negative biases.
Our last session, we talked about central tendency, we saw how the wrong measurement of central tendency could misrepresent the data by biasing it, or distorting systematically. For those who were not absent last time, I will do a small recap of the central tendency and then I will illustrate what a systematic error (bias) in action. The central tendency can be measured in three ways: mean, median, mode. Mean is the more precise, then median and lastly mode. In a normal condition, all three of them are equal; however, in the presence of outliner the mean is more distorted than the median.

So how do we avoid distortion in a business? Or what do you think the single most …show more content…
When we receive a report, we should not make assumption without studying and evaluating the situation of the given information. From my perception, assumption is the most unproductive source of bias in our business. When we start assuming, we are opening the door for bias. For example, a store located in an upscale neighborhood, the most expensive olive oil was the fastest moving and the cheapest one did not sale at all. Looking at the sale report someone could easily assume that the sale was high for the expensive oil because it’s good quality. May be the store was out of the least expensive oil and we could give different ideas. Negative bias could be present in the information, we are reviewing or the behavioral practices of the organization and creates distortion, reduce productivity or harm the society by making other belief in false information. It would be wise as a consumer or organization to find out the source of error, remove or control it by doing external and internal criteria. External criteria are one way to compare what we know of a topic with new finding and internal criteria is concerned with reliability and