Balancing Your Senses & Thoughts
Psych 🧠- 254/300
Reader,
Imagine you have to decide whether a picture looks funny or not.
Sometimes, you might think a picture is funny just because everyone around you is laughing, even if it's not really funny.
This is like a decision bias. It means your choice can be influenced by what others do.
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What is it?
Now, there's another kind of bias. Imagine you see something in the picture that's supposed to look funny, but you don't see it that way.
This is like a sensory bias, where your eyes see things differently.
This study explores biases in how people make decisions about what they perceive.
It finds that these biases can come from both what we sense and how we decide, and they can change over time.
The researchers used a task involving optical illusions, where participants judged whether distorted faces were actually physically distorted.
Initially, people were more likely to say the faces were distorted (a liberal bias), but over time, they became less biased, with decisional bias countering the sensory bias.
This dynamic competition affects reaction times and confidence in decision making.
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What do I need to know?
This study investigates biases in perceptual decision making, specifically focusing on sensory and decisional biases.
It reveals that these biases can change over time, especially the decisional bias.
Essentially, you might stop listening to what others say and trust your own eyes more. Even if everyone else laughs, you might not think it's funny if your eyes don't see it that way.
This means your own decision is getting stronger and competing with what others think, like a little game in your head.
So, sometimes, you might see something very differently from others because your own choice gets better with time.
Sources:
https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/tbq97/