Cognitive Bias

A Closer Look

As I discuss each of the cognitive biases below, I will start with a statement in quotation marks, speaking from the imagined perspective of my DHS caseworker. Unless otherwise indicated, these statements are my own assumption. I will follow these statements with a brief discussion of the meaning.

1. Fundamental Attribution Error: We judge others on their personality or fundamental character, but we judge ourselves on the situation.
   
   “She was late. She is lazy” We judge others based on what we see, often without asking clarifying questions before we assume the reasoning.

2. Self-Serving Bias: Our failures are situational, but our successes are our responsibility.
   
   “She did not make it to drug testing. She must be on drugs. Anything she says when I ask her why she missed it is a lie or just an excuse.” vs “I didn’t meet with her monthly as indicated on my paperwork and the court order but it’s not my fault. My case load is too high and I didn’t have time.” We are more likely to give ourselves leeway in our faults and errors and consider our reasoning to be an explanation. We are also more likely to give people the benefit of the doubt if we like them, and vice versa.

3. In-Group Favoritism: We favor people who are in our in-group as opposed to an out-group.
   
   “I work with a staff from Four Oaks. I favor them and their input more than the input of the person I am assessing or her lawyer.” I saw this live in action as the Four Oaks worker that spoke out on my behalf several times was shunned and his integrity questioned on the stand at the trial for terminating my parental rights. They went so far as to suggest he and I had an inappropriate relationship because I text him with concerns and questions. They never questioned any other worker, and I treated them all the same.

4. Bandwagon Effect: Ideas, fads, and beliefs grow as more people adopt them.
   
   “My entire team and I feel like everyone that has ever used drugs deserves to have their children taken from them. I would not give them back ever if I didn’t have to. I make sure to voice that opinion to everyone I come into contact with so they feel the same way.” I would rather my children be in the care of their father than let that DHS woman anywhere near my children, even if he was high. If you think I am a bad mother because I feel that way, then I really don’t care because I think you are blindly ignorant and I wouldn’t want YOU around my children either.

5. Groupthink: Due to a desire for conformity and harmony in the group, we make irrational decisions, often to minimize conflict.
   
   That same Four Oaks worker I mentioned in #3 later told me that “he understood” why the county attorney attacked his character, and he “didn’t blame them for what they said.” When asked if he still thought I was a good mother, he simply said he never saw any concerns. Before court he was so adamant about it, it was MY LAWYER that called him to testify on my behalf.
   

6. Halo Effect: If you see a person as having a positive trait, that positive impression will spill over into their other traits. (This also works for negative traits.)
   
   “That person is cool. Everything they say must be true” and “That person is a drug addict. Everything they say and do is invalid because of their addiction.” We all know that even the people who are highly regarded by society are capable of evil, ugly things. We should keep in mind that door swings both ways. People with a dark history of mental health issues, criminal charges, and/or addictions can get better and be better. I know one thing for sure, making it through to a sober life ISN”T going to happen when women and men that demonstrate their hatred and disgust in every word they say and every decision they make while holding children hostage.

7. Moral Luck: Better moral standing happens due to a positive outcome; worse moral standing happens due to a negative outcome.
   
   “XXX happened, so she must be an upstanding person. She has good values, so we can believe her” OR “XXX happened, so he must be a bad person. He has no morals and everything he does is wrong.” The morality of a person should not be judged on one happening or outcome. The outcome of one event does not provide a complete picture of a person’s integrity.
   

8. False Consensus: We believe more people agree with us than is actually the case.
   
   “I think that person is a worthless drug addict. Everyone thinks she is.” Believing something doesn’t mean it is true, or that everyone believes it. This is why we discuss things with other people. Exchanging original ideas and points of view helps keep us from getting stuck in the same rut. Continuing education and mental health support are essential, especially amongst case workers that are exposed to the uglier aspects of humanity.

9. Curse of Knowledge: Once we know something, we assume everyone else knows it, too.
   
   Don’t assume…. It makes an ASS of U and ME. The wide disparities in the socioeconomic statuses across the country lead to vast differences in the foundation of knowledge taught and absorbed by American students. Even if you consider your own elementary through high school education to be superior or poor, there are likely people out there that received better or poorer quality education. According to a 2009 study of 70 countries worldwide completed by the Program for International Student Assessments (PISA), “Our [US] students rank 14th when it comes to reading, 17th for science, and 25th for mathematics.”

10. Spotlight Effect: We overestimate how much people are paying attention to our behavior and appearance.

“They must be watching me all the time to see what I am up to.” I have heard this a hundred times from my paranoid friends. Don’t get me wrong, some of them were absolutely being watched, but some of them just needed a good night’s sleep. The government doesn’t need to follow you bro... they have all the information they could ever need about you thanks to that cell phone that is attached to your hand.

11. Availability Heuristic: We rely on immediate examples that come to mind while making judgments.
    
    Have you ever been listening to someone and they had trouble coming up with the word they wanted to use, and you made some guesses? Several guesses before getting it right? Not all of us are mind readers. Another hypothetical example: imagine you are watching someone walking through a yard in the dark; immediately you think of that commercial for neighborhood watch that showed a thief sneaking through a yard, so you assume the person you see is a thief. So you get yourself worked up and call the cops, when it was just someone cutting through the yard. That is unnecessary stress for you and your neighbors, and you wasted the resources of the local police department.

12. Defensive Attribution: As a witness who secretly fears being vulnerable to a serious mishap, we will blame the victim less if we relate to the victim.
    
    a. “I went to high school with her mother. Haven’t seen in her in years! It was nice catching up... She said her daughter punched her lightly in the face! Poor thing! Her daughter is a monster!” For the record, I pushed my mother and I sprayed her with an open bottle of McGillicuddy’s Apple Pie to stop her from coming at me again, but I did NOT punch her in the face. 2) I’m proud of myself. Some days I wish I would have, but she knows and I know that I would not have stopped at one. 3) I remember multiple times in my dreams as a kid, someone would be threatening or hurting me and when I tried to defend myself my punches would be more like love taps. No matter how hard I tried. So when someone attacks me, I black out I instinctively start swinging and I hit HARD. Like I break bones.

b. In contrast, people also generate defensive attributions to maintain negative views of people they don’t like and members of rival groups. “The daughter claims the mother attacked her, but I don’t like her. She obviously deserved this.” Another fun fact, daughter envy, also known as maternal envy, is a real psychological disorder. I have met countless women in my age group that experience verbal abuse and reputation-damaging accusations due to a mother who is powerless and jealous.

13. Just-World Hypothesis: We tend to believe the world is just; therefore, we assume acts of injustice are deserved.

“Her criminal record is mostly driving charges until she moved to Buchanan County. That state trooper must be a good cop, because he got her with a bunch of charges!” For those of you who have no clue what the judicial system is like in America, let me clue you in… It hasn’t represented justice in decades. What it has come to represent is oppression, racism, classism, modern day slavery, and RECIDIVISM.. People are spending time in PRISON for simple misdemeanors and weed charges, while pedophiles are slapped on the wrist and murderers are acquitted if they have enough money. Crooked cops, overzealous prosecutors, and a probation system built on policies that tie the hands of even well-meaning probation officers hold 0.7% of Americans in various correctional system institutions (Sawer & Wagner, 2020). This number may seem insignificant to you, but it is close to 1% which is 1 out of every 100 people. When looking at the incarceration of prisoners worldwide, 1 in 5 are Americans! Prison Policy Initiative (2020) also reports that 600,000 people enter prison, and citizens go to jail 10.6 million times EVERY YEAR. The statistics are alarming, and I could keep going, but maybe you should just read their report.

14. Naïve Realism: We believe that we observe objective reality and that other people are irrational, uninformed, or biased.
    
    “When I report my point of view, it is a factual account of events. Any statement she provides is just her excuses.” This mentality really pisses me off. These people spend a minute fraction of time with me, yet their view of my life is the only one that counts? Aside from family team meetings and court, I spoke with Mindy Juehl for two, maybe three hours total. The number of inaccuracies in her reports is astounding! Her account of the discussion she had behind closed doors with my children (without any audio or visual recording and without my permission) is readily accepted as fact, but allowing my children to testify in person so their voice can be heard is too traumatic… Do you see a pattern here?

15. Naïve Cynicism: We believe that we observe objective reality and that other people have a higher egocentric bias than they actually do in their intentions/actions.
    
    “She is only reporting an allergic reaction to the drug test patch so she can get out of patch testing because she is lying about her sobriety.” Disregard the multiple doctor visits I provided documentation for, the statements provided by Four Oaks staff that witnessed the allergic reaction, my health records that document my allergy to adhesive and tape, or the list of antihistamines I had to take in order to wear the patches. Even if I went to the doctor and she drug tested me before removing it due to severe reaction, the case worker would not even consider ordering other testing methods and continued to insist of the patch. CogBlog Author Paula Rodriguez (2019) reported that this also explains why humans are more likely to see the errors of others than we are to see the errors in ourselves, and why we are more likely to negatively view how others take responsibility.
    

16. Forer Effect (aka Barnum Effect): The phenomenon that occurs when individuals believe that personality descriptions apply specifically to them (more so than other people), despite the fact the description is actually filled with information that applies to everyone.
    
    “The psychological test showed these diagnoses. She does not agree with these diagnoses, but she is probably lying.” This may not be the typical response according to the Forer Effect, named for the social psychologist that proved his hypothesis by administering personality tests to his students, giving them all the same written results, and surveying them to rank the accuracy of their results. Psychological and personality testing, and the results they provide, do not necessarily provide an accurate picture of the subject. These tests should be assessed for objectivity, but it is impossible to account for the way every person would interpret the question in a way that ensures 100% accuracy.

17. Dunning-Kruger Effect: The less you know, the more confident you are. The more you know, the less confident you are.
    
    “I spent two hours interviewing her and going over her personal history. I can already tell she is a terrible person and doesn’t deserve her kids.” Like I said earlier, these people have no clue what our lives were like or who I am as a mother. In their defense, I realize they are understaffed and case loads make it near impossible to devote the time necessary for them to develop a full, clear picture. However, if I were aware of this as a case manager, I would be sure to take that into consideration in my assessment, instead of ignorantly asserting myself as the expert on another person’s life.
    

18. Anchoring: We rely heavily on the first piece of information introduced when making decisions.
    
    “They are on drugs. They won’t get clean. Let’s make their lives hell, because they are drug addicts and they deserve it..” There were many times throughout my experience with Benton County DHS that I felt this way. Maybe this was my own bias, based on the initial meeting when I first saw these people were not there to help me, but it was reinforced at every turn.
    

19. Automation Bias: refers to a specific class of errors people tend to make in the automated decision making contexts, when many decisions are handled by automated aids (e.g. computers), and the human actor is largely present to monitor on-going tasks. (Skitka, 2011).
    
    “The computer system ranks your community support as 0. You do have quite a bit of support, albeit non-traditional, but I can’t change it. This part comes from a check box assessment tool I do on the computer.” This is the answer I received when I confronted a Four Oaks Worker about the grading scale included at the end of each of their reports. She went on to say that the community support section looks at things like relationships in the community, and doesn’t necessarily take into account circumstances like having recently moved to a new town. Nice. Even the computerized charting system is subjective.
    

20. Google Effect (aka Digital Amnesia): We tend to forget information that’s easily looked up in search engines.
    
    “I can’t remember exactly what she told me. I will google it. I’m sure I will find something on the internet that fits into what I want to write in my report.” I imagine she thought something like this to herself when she couldn’t remember details I told her from my past and seemingly just made something up.
    

21. Reactance: A tendency to do the opposite of what we are being compelled to do as a response to perceived threats to our freedom of choice.
    
    “At the family team meeting, the client spoke at length about her history and how we have her all wrong, urging us to give her a chance. I don’t like being told what to do. I will do everything I can to hinder her because she won’t tell me what to do.” According to Steve Booth-Butterfield, award-winning professor and blogger, this phenomena has three specific parts, the first being the critical component. First there must be a perceived threat to freedom or unfair restriction. Second, reactance is activated, which is an “intensely emotional, single-minded, and sometimes irrational” mind state. And third, the person must act to remove the reactance: to “right the wrong” or to get around the restriction. On the other hand, another example is the reaction that parents when the system attempts to force them into sobriety, using their children as the dangling carrot. It is human nature to do the opposite of what we are being forced to do, so on top of experiencing physiological effects of withdrawal and a strong tendency towards relapse, one must also be aware of and combat this knee-jerk human response. As a profession that works directly with addicts, wouldn’t you think their policies would be more in-line with evidence-based practice for treating addiction? Well, you’d be wrong… good thing you aren’t a parent struggling with addiction, huh?
    

22. Confirmation Bias: We tend to find and remember information that confirms our perceptions.
    
    “The house is a mess and there are dishes in the sink. She is obviously on drugs.” As humans, we see what we want to see. If we walk into a situation looking for negatives, all we are going to see is negatives and will even overlook the positives. There were many times I read their reports and noted that instead of documenting what I said, they completely made something up that better fits the picture they wanted to paint of me.
    

23. Backfire Effect: Disproving evidence sometimes has the unwarranted effect of confirming our beliefs.
    
    “Her mother did report she was faking her drug tests. Even though the agency that we contract for drug testing denies there is any possible way to ‘fake’ patch and hair drug tests, there is no way she is clean.” When I argued against the results of the initial hair drug test that came back positive for methamphetamine, and later the patch tests that again showed positive for trace amounts of methamphetamine (but not the marijuana I had been smoking daily), I was cut off and harshly told that “the hair [and patch] tests are 100% accurate.’ There is no way to corroborate claims of false positive results as a parents fighting the system. They don’t accept testing from any other agency or institution. The policy of Central Iowa Juvenile Detention Center, which is agency they contract for drug testing, instructs staff to stand outside the restroom while a sample is obtained by a member of the opposite sex. Which is apparently more valid than the samples tested by my probation officer who stood directly in front of me and observed me while I provided a sample, as did my substance abuse counselor, and the staff contracted by the Iowa Board of Nursing that were specifically trained for the Iowa Nurse Assistance Program. Isn’t that NEAT?
    

24. Third-Person Effect: The tendency to perceive how media coverage others to a greater extent than it influences oneself. Closely related to the spiral-to-silence theory which involves the influence that perceived public perception has in the formation of one’s own opinion and the growing tendency towards silence in contradicting this perceived public opinion.
    
    “I am doing what the public wants by removing these children from their parents. I am saving them.” There have been countless studies regarding the removal of children from a home, and whether the interventions put in place by the department are beneficial. I found this article from a book called Future Child (2019) was impartial and accurate in its findings that assert department interventions are typically not beneficial, while family support programs are far more helpful to prevent issues from happening or recurring.
    

25. Belief Bias: We judge an argument’s strength not by how strongly it supports the conclusion but how plausible the conclusion is in our own minds.
    
    “She argues that she was busy at work and unable to leave for testing during the allotted hour time frame. She’s just making excuses, and that’s not a good enough reason to miss testing because I think she is using drugs.” They specifically told my daughter’s father that if he couldn’t make it to testing because he was at work, he just needed to let them know. In the beginning they seemed to bend over backwards to accommodate my sons’ father and his work schedule. They even sent people to his work to test him. Anytime I mentioned issues with my work schedule and testing, they were disregarded as excuses and if I missed testing, then it was counted against me as if I had provided a dirty sample. Makes total sense, I know!

26. Availability Cascade: Tied to our need for social acceptance, collective beliefs gain more plausibility through public repetition.
    
    Negative portrayals about addicts and the recovery process in the media, the war on drugs propaganda, and reports from a seemingly trustworthy organization like DHS/CPS that purportedly works for the best interest of children are all repetitive reinforcements that assert addicts are incapable of growth and progress like other adults, and that government and judicial institutions are acting justly on behalf of society for the greater good. The Center for American Progress (2018) reports that since Nixon enacted the war on drug in 1971, the US has spent ONE TRILLION DOLLARS; meanwhile an American is arrested for drug possession every 25 seconds and the total number of arrests for possession is SIX TIMES greater than the number of arrests for drug sales. Is that supposed to prove it’s working?
    

27. Declinism: We tent to romanticize the past and view the future negatively, believing that societies/institutions are by and large in decline.
    
    “This community is a hot spot for drug addictions, and its just going to get worse. No sense in working to improve ihe situation by actually helping the people we work with. Stealing their children will likely drive them further into depression and substance abuse, but all that matters is we ‘save’ the children.” Again, I’m not sure if they even read evidence-based practice for supporting recovery from addiction, or the conditions that best promote child development, but I’m pretty sure destroying families, alienating parents, and contributing to the hopeless feeling that potentiates addiction benefits NO ONE.
    

28. Status Quo Bias: We tend to prefer things to stay the same; changes from the baseline are considered to be a loss.
    
    “Learning from the negative outcomes we have contributed to would mean the work we have done in the past had faults in our system. Adapting our policies in light of new research would mean acknowledging our guilt. We can’t do that!” God forbid this team be forced to re-examine their life’s work and how it contributed to the degradation of society and alienated a significant percentage of the population, especially in small communities.
    

29. Sunk Cost Fallacy (aka Escalation of Commitment): We invest more in things that have cost us something rather than altering our investments, even if we face negative outcomes.
    
    “We chose to place the children at a home located two hours away from the primary parent. Despite the high costs of transporting the children to and from the supervised visits we are required to provide, we would not even consider placing the children with trusted family friends that provided daycare to the children for over a year that live 30 minutes away. We cited the fact that they were not blood-related as our reasoning.” I requested the case worker reconsider placement closer to my home several times. As time went on, four oaks workers made comments about the time and financial costs involved with our case as if I had made the decision and should feel responsible.
    

30. Gambler’s Fallacy: We think future possibilities are affected by past events.
    
    “Once an addict, always an addict. Why do they even pretend to try?” Throughout my case, I rarely felt supported by staff involved with my family, like they always expected me to fail. Like they were betting I would fail, based on failures from my past. Encouraging, right?
    

31. Zero-Risk Bias: We prefer to reduce small risks to zero, even if we can reduce more risk overall with another option.
    
    “My report and the computerized system that spits out numbers shows a small to moderate risk of neglect and abuse due to the current circumstances. We better remove the children and terminate the parental rights.” Prior to involvement by this particular team, I had had several run-ins with other agencies, none of which documented concerns anywhere near the level that they even considered removing my children. The conditions under which this team removed my children from their father were not due to actual harm, only the potential for harm. None of the workers that accompanied my children for supervised visits ever voiced concerns over the health and safety of my children while they were in my care.
    

32. Framing Effect: We often draw different conclusions from the same information depending on how it’s presented
    
    “I feel strongly that this parent is a worthless drug addict. I will present her as such to the rest of the team, in hopes that they will follow suit and affirm my beliefs.” I agree that it would be difficult to maintain objectivity when presenting my observations of a person or family interaction to a group. Even formulating a description of what was observed can potentially be colored with one’s thoughts and feelings about it. I don’t know how to combat this tendency other than to be aware of it both while we prepare information to be presented and while it is being presented.
    

33. Stereotyping: We adopt generalized beliefs that members of a group will have certain characteristics, despite not having information about the individual.
    
    “Addicts have high relapse rates, so that means helping this person is a waste of time and resources because she will never recover.” Contrary to popular opinion, you might be surprised to see a list of people that use substances in their day-to-day lives. I personally have known lawyers, doctors, coaches, police officers, and other supposed prominent members of society that successfully hid their substance abuse for years.
    

34. Outgroup Homogeneity Bias: We perceive out-group members as homogeneous and our own in-groups as more diverse.
    
    “She is connected to this group of people, so she must be just like them.” Similar to stereotyping, it is easy to label groups or even whole communities a certain way based on outsider perspectives.
    

35. Authority Bias: We trust and are more often influenced by the opinions of authority figures.
    
    “The Four Oaks worker later said that she thought the parent was under the influence of something while she was at the supervised visit, so it must be true that she was.” More and more we are hearing reports related to the abuse of power and perjury committed by people in positions of authority. Just because someone works under a certain title, does not mean they are above human biases and temptations or that they are necessarily qualified for the work they do. Obtaining a social work degree and being hired by the department of human services does not automatically make someone an expert on children. I would think that is especially true if the social worker does not have children of his or her own.
    

36. Placebo Effect: If we believe a treatment will work, it often will have a small physiological effect.
    
    “I believe that stimulant medication is the only way to treat aggressive and overactive behaviors in children. Parents that refuse this type of treatment are abusing their children.” The case worker and foster mom pushed for medicating my child with stimulants, and later antidepressants. They treated me poorly and it was obvious they looked down upon me for insisting that ongoing cognitive behavioral therapy was less harmful and more beneficial. Despite the fact that I am a graduate degree prepared nurse with years of experience case managing pediatric clients, contrary to the opinion of the specialists and doctors they paraded him in front of being in agreement with me, they continued in their campaign to medicate my child. The IEP evaluation they insisted on determined that even without medication, my son did not need special intervention. The foster mother obviously spoke at length with my son, who turned his nose up at the thought of meditation and other natural and proven remedies to help his depression, insisting he wanted to be medicated. These people make me sick.
    

37. Survivorship Bias: We tend to focus on those things that survived a process and overlook ones that failed.
    
    “The work we do saves lives. Removing children and terminating parental rights are the only way to ensure they are safe.” I happen to know several children whose lives were negatively impacted after they were removed from their parents and placed with adults that the department deemed to be better caregivers. One girl was raped repeatedly and her cries for help ignored by the grandmother that was awarded full custody of her. As a young nurse, I worked in a home providing care to a foster child that I ended up reporting to the department after observing gross negligence in his care after a snow storm delayed my arrival by a couple hours. There were SEVEN other special needs foster children living in that home, and it makes me tear up thinking about them to this day.
    

38. Tachypsychia: Our perceptions of time shift depending on trauma, drug use, and physical exertion.
    
    I feel the effects of trauma on a daily basis and it has negatively affected my abilities and my sense of time. While I concede the drug use didn’t help, I feel very strongly that the repeated traumas I endured at the hands of the department did far more to erode who I was as a person than my substance use ever did. Sobriety did nothing to shake the devastating effects.
    

39. Law of Triviality (aka “Bike-Shedding”): We give disproportionate weight to trivial issues, often while avoiding more complex issues.
    
    “We will focus on when she got pulled over for driving while barred and use this as justification that she is a bad person in order to avoid analyzing the requirements we placed on her and how we contributed to the situation through our lack of support or willingness to help.” We require you to do this, this, this, this, and this, but we will only provide transportation for visits. If you don’t do those other things, you are a bad parent and person. We don’t care about your “excuses” just get it done.
    

40. Zeigarnik Effect: We remember incomplete tasks more than completed ones.
    
    “She provided 12 clean drug tests, but she missed three of them because she says she has to work. When we go to court, we will emphasize the three missed tests in our report.” It seemed like the reports they filed emphasized the things I did not do, exaggerating my failures and downplaying my successes.
    

41. Bystander Effect: The more other people are around, the less likely we are to help a victim.
    
    The multidisciplinary team involved with my family’s case included: the DHS case worker, the Four Oaks case worker, her supervisor, the family team meeting coordinator, my lawyer, the foster mom, the guardian ad litem (lawyer representing the kids), and my parent partner. Aside from my lawyer and the parent partner that was assigned to me, I did not feel any of them were helpful or even really tried to reunify my family. They just stood by judging every aspect of my life negatively, adding more and more requirements, while not following through on the requirements ordered by the judge or that they set for themselves.
    

42. Suggestibility: We, especially children, sometimes mistake ideas suggested by a questioner for memories.
    
    “I interviewed the child today at his school. This is my interpretation of what was said.” People that work with children, especially those charged with the task of interviewing a child, receive specialized training to word questions a certain way so they are not leading the child or affecting his or her answers. If I were assessing a situation and had to interview a child, I would put measures in place to thoroughly document the interview. I certainly would not question a child that I have never met alone behind closed doors, especially without recording it. I would want that record so that I was not relying solely on my memory when completing paperwork later on to ensure integrity in my work and provide proof if needed. But that’s just me, what do I know….
    

43. False Memory: We mistake imagination for real memories. Next...
    

44. Cryptomnesia: We mistake real memories for imagination.

These tendencies to mistake imagination for real memories and vice versa was used to their advantage as I was progressively phased out of their life. My son questioned whether several memories, witnessed by others, were true and reported memories that were not true. Wondering about the memories of me and our family that they were able to distort or erase is devastating and I have learned to stop myself from letting my mind wander down that path.

45. Clustering Illusion: We find patterns and “clusters” in random data.
    
    This goes along with other previously mentioned cognitive biases in that we see what we want to see, and if we are looking hard enough we can make anything fit to support our point of view.

46. Pessimism Bias: We sometimes overestimate the likelihood of bad outcomes.
    
    This tendency is often used to justify extreme measures implemented in the name of safety. A handful of bad outcomes overrules the majority of good outcomes….
    

47. Optimism Bias: We sometimes are over-optimistic about good outcomes.
    
    Adversely, a handful of good outcomes lead us to believe that will always be the outcome. The problem is the number of possible results is directly independent on the number of variables involved, and when it comes to people there are no guarantees. Socrates said, “'Remember that there is nothing stable in human affairs; therefore avoid undue elation in prosperity, or undue depression in adversity.'
    

48. Blind Spot Bias: We don’t think we have bias, and we see it others more than ourselves.
    
    “She just thinks we are treating her unfair because she is biased against DHS.” I have no problem admitting I am biased against the department. I could cite many instances that reinforce that negative point of view, but that does not mean I am ignorant enough to deny my own wrongdoings and how I contributed to the situation. There are many things that I know now that I wish I knew back then, but that’s for another post.
    

49. IKEA Effect: We place higher value on things we partially created ourselves.
    
    We love to pat ourselves on the back and admire our creations. Something we built or developed is of course more valuable to us than something we bought.
    

50. Ben Franklin Effect: We like doing favors; we are more likely to do another favor for someone if we’ve already done a favor for them than if we had received a favor from that person.
    
    This is an interesting fact about humans. Not really relevant to the rest of this particular article, but noteworthy to say the least.
    

There ya have it. This is not an exhaustive list but a good start to understanding the faults in our own psyche as individuals and as a group. Now that you know about them, that is half the battle in overcoming them. I never heard a word about the pumpkins I delivered, and while I am disappointed, my reason for doing it had nothing to do with getting a response. My hope, and primary motivation, is that the message was received with an open mind and action was taken to ensure they don’t make the same mistakes again.

Resources

Berger, L. M., & Font, S. A. (2015). The Role of the Family and Family-Centered Programs and Policies. The Future of children, 25(1), 155–176. Retrieved on July 23, 2021 from: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6342196/

Fioriello, P. (2020). How the Educational System in America Compares to Other Countries. Critical Issues in Education. Dr. PF Consults. Retrieved July 22 2021 from: https://drpfconsults.com/educational-system-in-america-compares-education-countries/#

Krauss Whitbourne, S. (2010). When It Comes to Personality Tests, a Dose of Skepticism is a Good Thing. Sussex Publishers, LLC. Psychology Today. Retrieved July 22, 2021 from: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/fulfillment-any-age/201008/when-it-comes-personality-tests-dose-skepticism-is-good-thing

Pearl, B. (2018). Ending the War on Drugs: By the Numbers.[Fact sheet]. Center for American Progress. Retrieved on July 23, 2021 from: https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/criminal-justice/reports/2018/06/27/452819/ending-war-drugs-numbers/

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