Is Bias Beneficial?

Up: Notes on Research

It would seem to be part of the definition of the word that bias is a bad thing, and egotistical bias a particularly bad thing.

A case has been made, though, that some specific egotistical cognitive biases such as superiority bias or beneffectance have a positive effect. One interesting finding is that people who are depressed are less prone to certain biases:

"There is in fact a category of people who get unusually close to the truth about themselves and the world. Their self-perceptions are more balanced, they assign responsibility for success and failure more even-handedly, and their predictions for the future are more realistic. These people are living testimony to the dangers of self-knowledge. They are the clinically depressed."

-quote from the first chapter of A mind of its own by Cordelia Fine, summarising the Taylor and Brown research mentioned below.

Another finding is that people who are prone to certain biases seem happier, healthier and more successful. Joanna E. Starek and Caroline F. Keating (1991) tested swimmers at a national championship for self-deception. Those that qualified were found to be more prone to self-deception than those who did not. ("Self-Deception and Its Relationship to Success in Competition" Basic and Applied Social Psychology 1991, Vol. 12, No. 2, Pages 145-155).

Correlations like this don't prove a causal relation.

• It could be that self-deception biases enhance performance, and seeing yourself as you really are causes depression
• It could be that depression causes you to see yourself as you really are.
• It could be that people who do well have some other advantage, one negative by-product of which is self-deception.
• It could be that self-deceiving people are better at covering up their problems (hard to see how this would affect performance in a swimming competition, though).
• It could be that self-regarding biases make a person happier and better able to cope with life, but only because they care less about the suffering of other people. This would mean that while biases are beneficial to the individual, they are neither morally good nor true.

Tavris and Aronson, in Mistakes Were Made, but not by me, illustrate very movingly the effects of self-regarding bias by considering the history of politicians, police, therapists and others who were unable to confront their own bad decisions because of cognitive bias.

Taylor, S. E. & Brown, J. D. (1988). Illusion and well-being: A social psychological perspective on mental health. (Psychological Bulletin, 103, 193—210.)

• If we define mental health as contact with reality, without illusion, then the science of cognitive biases shows that no one is mentally healthy.
• So the question becomes, are people who self deceive more than a control group healthier or les healthy than others?
• Three important self-regarding biases:

1. Exaggerated perception of (the self's) control or mastery (over life's circumstances) (cf. Illusion of Control)
2. Unrealistic optimism
3. Positive self-regard (including Superiority Bias)

Goleman argues that although biases may be beneficial to the individual, a society of biased individuals is headed for disaster (c.f. Greenwald's point that although totalitarian societies do worse than free societies, totalitarian egos do better than non-totalitarian egos).

"Given the dangers from the nuclear threat or other catastrophic weapons on the one hand, or those from the ecological crisis on the other, our positive illusions can become a pathological response. [...] The illusion of an unrealistically positive self-view, coupled with the power of excuse-making, can make one feel that even if things look dim, one is doing enough, no matter how little that may be."

"The illusions and excuses that serve us so well individually allow us to ignore the consequences of how we live. Relying on those illusions creates a self-fulfilling prophecy: By acting like nothing we do makes a difference for the worse, we do nothing that might make a difference for the better."

-quoted from D. J. Goleman (1989) "What is negative about positive illusions? When benefits for the individual harm the collective" Journal of social and clinical psychology 8:22, 190-197

Two blows for the reality-based view of mental health (rather arbitrarily chosen):

C. Randall Colvin, Jack Block and David C. Funder (1995). "Overly Positive Self-Evaluations and Personality: Negative Implications for Mental Health" Journal of Personality and Social Psychology Vol. 68, No. 6, 1152-1162

The relation between overly positive self-evaluations and psychological adjustment was examined. Three studies, two based on longitudinal data and another on laboratory data, contrasted self-descriptions of personality with observer ratings (trained examiners or friends) to index self-enhancement. In the longitudinal studies, self-enhancement was associated with poor social skills and psychological maladjustment 5 years before and 5 years after the assessment of self-enhancement. In the laboratory study, individuals who exhibited a tendency to self-enhance displayed behaviors, independently judged, that seemed detrimental to positive social interaction. These results indicate there are negative short-term and long-term consequences for individuals who self-enhance and, contrary to some prior formulations, imply that accurate appraisals of self and of the social environment may be essential elements of mental health.

Jonathan Shedler, Martin Mayman and Melvin Manis (1993). "The Illusion of Mental Health" American Psychologist Vol. 48, No. 11, 1117-1131

"Positive illusion studies nearly always assess mental health using simple self-report scales. It is therefore likely that the "normal" groups in these studies contain a mix of genuinely healthy people (who may not distort very much) and defensive deniers (who may distort a great deal). The presence of the defensive deniers would account for the paradoxical finding that "normal" subjects distort more than depressive subjects. In short, positive illusion findings may be nothing but artifacts, due to researchers' inability to assess mental health in any meaningful way."

"Positive illusion studies show that some people perceive things in distorted, self-serving ways. They also show that these same people tend to look good on self-report scales (which ask transparent questions about how people perceive things). The most straightforward conclusion is that people who are prone to distort also give distorted responses to mental health scale items, and their scores simply cannot be taken at face value."

In Thinking and Deciding, Jonathan Baron writes (p. 39):

"It is true that some of us maintain an overly rosy view of ourselves through a kind of irrationality, in which we ignore the evidence against our rosy views. We convince ourselves that everything is just dandy, without asking whether it could be better. Many people may live their entire lives this way, happy as clams. [...] In my view, happiness does not require such irrationality. Often, the happiness that results from irrationally formed beliefs goes along with irrationally formed goals. [...] If one's goals are as rationally formed as one's beliefs about how well one's goals are being achieved, accurate beliefs need not be disappointing"

Constantine Sedikides, Robert S. Horton, Aiden P. Gregg (2007)

The Why's the Limit: Curtailing Self-Enhancement With Explanatory Introspection

Journal of Personality 75 (4), 783–824.

Self-enhancement is linked to psychological gains (e.g., subjective well-being, persistence in adversity) but also to intrapersonal and interpersonal costs (e.g., excessive risk taking, antisocial behavior).

self-enhancement is positively associated with multiple indicators of mental health and with a more favorable impact on others.

"Believing one has more talents and positive qualities than one’s peers allows one to feel good about oneself and to enter the stressful circumstances of daily life with the resources conferred by a positive sense of self. As such, these self-enhancing beliefs may help people achieve mental health and behave positively toward others, thriving, in part, through the personal resource of their own positive self-regard."