Thursday, 27 February 2014

Confirmation Bias

Afternoon Bloggers

I have been looking into the psychology of us humans to get things wrong and to make mistakes.

It has become more important to me over the last few years where personal experience has shown that situations happen and can be misinterpreted.

There are situations in life like investigation and gathering facts and risk where opinion and information has to be gathered.

I recently watched a documentary on Confirmation Bias and it was a serious eye opener.

In this program the Nobel Prize winning psychologist Mr Daniel Kahneman showed many examples of how we as humans are not good at snap decision making.

This program has helped me to understand that when our opinions and past experiences are utilized to make decisions we can make errors, This is known as A bias and there are many different types.

Us Humans can be very lazy and will utilize our brains to make snap decisions and assumptions sometimes these could be correct however most of the time these decisions are wrong.

The field of social care can be full of negative situations however not all situations are the same and should be thought of independently.

For example if two males were looking after an elderly man is this wrong ?
 
Just because an environment is not the norm does that make it wrong ?

This is why the importance of investigation is necessary and this needs to be devoid of bias.

The recent prevalence of media highlighting elderly and child abuse and neglect professionals are under increasing public scrutiny to protect and to be seen to act fast.

This is a welcome situation to see, as in our civilized society there is no place for abuse and neglect and rightly so should not be tolerated.

My mistake in life was to assume that when any individual or organization makes a mistake then a swift apology should be forthcoming and further could not understand why 2 years on I am still waiting for any sort of acceptance or apology from the county council.

I now understand why this has never happened as Daniel Kahnerman has shown we as humans will never fully accept any change of a snap decision or opinion even when shown the full truth of a situation.

It is without any doubt that any person involved in collating evidence or investigation should gain evidence to avoid any doubt to either support the assumption or disprove.

This should be the key to any investigation outcome as anything else will lead to a child unnecessarily being taken into care or elderly people being taken from there own home and into residential care and innocent carers or family being mentally abused.

Social workers need to be fully aware that there own prejudiced and bias could be affecting there day to day decisions.

For further information see links

http://www.telegraph.co.uk

Description of fast and slow decision making

Tell me your thoughts.

Have a good day Steve......
















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