Understanding errors, biases
that can affect journalists
By S. MOLLY STOCKIMQ
and PAQET H. GROSSIn the last fifteen years, psychology has
witnessed an explosion of knowledge about
how human begins p>rocess information. Muchof this new knowledge concerns limitations
and biases in percep>tion, memory, and reasoning.
Research on eyewitness testimony has
highlighted the distortions in perception andmemory that can plague observers, particularly observers under stress at the moment ofobservation or recollection. Similarly, studies
on the way fjeople make inferences haveshown us that people often favor anecdotal
information over more reliable base ratestatistical information. Even when instructed
to be "objective," they often seek and selectdata according to preexisting expectations or
theories.
Other research has documented the difficulties (jeople have evaluating risk. Still more
research has shown that [seople easily ignore
sampling biases, fail to understand regression effects, often believe they "knew something all along" even if they didn't, tend to attribute the causes of p>eople's behavior todispositional rather than to situational factors, and often imagine association between
events where none exists. Significantly,
many of the errors and biases to whichpeople fall prey only get worse under time
constraints.
For journalists who pledge allegiance toobjectivity and/or fairness as they observeand interpret fseople and events, such knowledge is fX3tentially of great relevance. Yet
only a small percentage of what we know
appears to have found its way into joumalismclassrooms, most of it in upper-level or
graduate courses that consider how audiences, as distinct from journalists, process information.
Moreover, hardly any of this knowledge
seems to have found its way into courses andtextbooks that train students to write, edit,
and refxjrt the news. Even those texts that do
devote spzce to documented distortions ininterviewing and observation (cf. Rivers &Harrington, 1988) have either ignored more
recent Findings on cognitive error and bias or
drawn upon but a small portion of thisresearch.
Given the growing demands on joumalists to report and interpret the activities of anincreasingly complex society and the demonstrated importance of the news media forsetting public and private agendas, this is ashame. It is also a problem we may be able
to do something about.
In the pages that follow, we will outline
some of the more important errors and biases
in thinking that psychologists have documented in recent years. We have little formal
knowledge about the existence and operation of such biases in journalists (as we havenoted, and lamented, in Stocking & Gross,1988). However, we do know they havebeen found in a variety of professions andacross a variety of tasks (cf. Loftus, 1979;
Sims, Gioia, & Associates, 1986; and Rogoff &Lave, 1984), leading us to think they probably
show up in joumalists' work as well. We
hope that joumalism educators, when alerted
to these common errors and biases, will be
motivated to leam more about them and seek
ways, in classrooms and textbooks, to bringthem to the attention of their students.

The eyewitness fallacy
As everyone knows, "seeing is believing."
When someone says, "I saw it with my own
eyes," people listen, believe, and remember.
Indeed, fisychologists who have studied
Stocking is assistantprqfessor of joumalism
at Indiana University. Gross is a law student
at Columbia University.

EDUCATOR/SPRiriQ 1989

the impact of eyewitness testimony in jury
trials have found that jurors, when reachinga verdict, give much more weight to eyewitness testimony than they do to other kinds ofevidence (Loftus, 1979).
Not surprisingly, journalists seem to understand intuitively the pxDwer of eyewitness
accounts. Thus, as van Dijk (in press) has
pointed out, editors so value first-hand reports that they "may even send a special
envoy to places where already dozens ofother reporters are present." (p. 78)
The problem is that eyewitness accounts,
while more convincing than hearsay accounts, are not always reliable. Research on
eyewitness testimony (c.f., Loftus, 1979) isvery clear about this fact: Observations canvary and err as a funrtion of a variety offactors such as prejudice, temporary expectations, the types of details being obwerved, andstress. It is very easy, in other words, for one's
observations (and one's memories about
observations) to be distorted or flat-out wrong.
In one of the most well-known demonstrations of the fallibility of observations,
reported in Loftus (1979), Hastorf and Cantrill(1954) examined people's perceptions of afootball game between Dartmouth and Princeton. The game, one of the dirtiest androughest played by either team, was filmed
and shown to students on each campus.
Students were instructed to note any rule
infractions they saw and to rate them as either"flagrant" or "mild."
In spite of instructions to be completely
objective in their observations, students atthe two schools perceived the infractions
very differently. More precisely, students at
Princeton saw the Dartmouth players make9.8 infractions, more than twice the numberof infractions they saw their own team make(4.2). Moreover, they saw the Dartmouth
players make more than twice as many
infraak>ns as Dartmouth students saw theirteam make. Princeton students tended to rate
the violations by their own team as mild andthose committed by the Dartmouth team as
flagrant. Dartmouth students were more
evenhanded when they saw the film, seeing
about the same number of infrartions forboth teams (4.3 by Dartmouth and 4.4 by
EDUCATOR/SPRIMQ 1 9 8 9Princeton), but they also tended to see theviolations of the opposing team as more
flagrant than violations by their own team.
Obviously, people don't always see what
others see; even when instructed to be objective, they often see what they want to see.
It is perhaps an obvious point that one's
fjersonal prejudices can unconsciously affectthe accuracy of one's observations; personal
prejudice is usually what journalism educators mean when they warn about "bias" in thenews. However, research on eyewitness
testimony (Loflus, 1979) suggests that otherfactors besides personal prejudice can lead to
unreliable eyewitness reports, among them:
temporary expectations, expectations frompast experience, and stressEyewitness accounts can also be unreliable when the event has been witnessed
infrequently and for a short period of time,
when violence has been involved, when along time has elapsed between witnessing
the event and reporting it, or when thewitness is under stress at the time of recollection. Researchers have also found that information introduced after an event has takenplace can alter the memory of it; thus, if areporter witnesses a concert and then reads
a competitor's article on the concert, thereporter may alter his own memory of theevent to conform to information contained in
his competitor's account.
The point in all this (and much more,contained in Loftus, 1979) is simple: People,
journalists included, may put more weight oneyewitness accounts than they do on otherkinds of evidence. Unless journalists areaware of the ways that eyewitness accounts
can be biased and erroneous, they, like juries,
may fallaciously assume that such accounts
offer more truth than they do. Such assumptions could, in tum, influence reporters to"count on" such accounts and prematurely
limit their repxDrting efforts.

Undeaitilization of statistics
Related to people's tendency to weight
eyewitness accounts more than other typesof evkdence is a tendency for people to favor
anecdotal or case history information overbase rate statistical information (information

about the percentage of cases in the population).
This tendency to underutilize more reliable base rate information, to focus on speciric individuals and make less use of information about the |x>pulation from which individuals come, has been vividly demonstrated in a study by Hamill, Wilson, andNisbett (1980). In this study, subjects read amagazine article about a Puerto Rican woman
who had a number of unmanageable children by a succession of common-law husbands. When this anecdotal case was presented along with base rate statistics indicating that 90 percent of welfare recipients "areoff the welfare rolls by the end of four years,"
subjects regarded the case history as more
informative than the more reliable base ratestatistics. Put another way, the statistical facts
had less impact on jseople's views about thelaziness and hopelessness of welfare recipients than did the single vivid case.
Just why people favor anecdotal information over base rate information is unclear. It
may be because the information contained in
anecdotes is usually more vivid (Nisbett &Borgida, 1975; Nisbett & Ross, 1980), or it
may be that the information in anecdotes
seems more relevant (Tversky & Kahneman,1978). But regardless of the precise reason,
what the Hamill et al. study and related
research suggests for journalists, who routinely use anecdotes to "jjersonalize" thenews, is a need to handle anecdoul information with considerable caution.
Some sources are masters of the anecdote.
Intentionally or unintentionally, they may
present anecdoul dau that do not squarewith more abstract statistical information. If
reporters fall victim to. the tendency to favor
vivid anecdoul information over pallid but
reliable sUtistics, they, and their audiences inturn, may be misled.

Conflrmation bias
Intellectually, most of us probably realizethat preconceived ideas shap>e how we view,interpret, and remember information. But
what we may not realize is the extent towhich such notions bias us.
In recent years, psychologists have con-

6'. . . preconceived ideas
can be very powerfulindeed in shaping what
we see, understzmd, andremember.'ducted research revealing that preconceived
ideas can be very p>owerful indeed in shaping
what we see, undersUnd, and remember. In
fact, so powerful are their effects that it is hard
to imagine they do not affect the work ofjoumalists and journalists-in-training.
The tendency for people to seek, select,
and recall dau according to preexisting
expeaations or theories is called the "confirmation bias." To undersUnd its pervasiveness, it is imp)orunt to undersUnd how it
works.
Two processes seem imporUnt here. First,
when people seek information with respect
to one theory, they are unlikely to seek
information with resp>ect to another theory
simulUneously. People, in short, test theories one at a time, or sequentially. So, forexample, the person who is testing a theory
about the negative impact of feminism on
women's lives is unlikely to test theories
about its positive impact as well. Similarly,
the individual testing the theory that there isa "crime wave" against the elderly (Fishman,1980) is unlikely to test the opposite theory
that there are no crimes against the elderly.
Secondly, as people seek information withwhich to test their theories, they show adramatic tendency to use a theory-confirming strategy. For example, a repxDiter who has
theorized that there is a crime wave against
the elderly may unconsciously seek out
sources that confirm this theory—the potential and actual elderly victims in a bad part oftown, the head of a crime prevention program for the elderly, etc. Further, the reporter
may ask questions of these sources — about
increases in reported crimes, efforts to reduce
crimes, and the like — that confirm thetheory, without asking probing questions

EDUCATOR/SPRiriQ 1989

that might disconfirm the hypothesis (Snyder started, the police wire was steadily supply& Swann, 1979).
ing the press with fresh incidents almost
Not only may expectations influence the every day." Even when a reporter examinedsources to which reporters tum and the types police crime statistics and discovered thatof questions a reporter may ask, but they also crimes against the elderly had actually demay influence journalists' evaluatk>n and creased (.not increased) compared to theselection of data. One pervasive bias in previous year, the crime wave theme reperceivers' decisions about what information mained in place. As Fishman tells it, "Theis most relevant or credible is the tendency to reporter was puzzled and eventually decided
regard information that is consistent with to ignore the police figures. He felt they were
one's a priori theories as the worthiest pieces unreliable and incomplete, and anyway heof information (Darley & Gross, 1984; Hayden had to do the story as originally planned& Mischel, 1976; Snyder & GangesUd, 1981). because the whole issue was too big to passThus, when one is testing a theory about the up or p>lay down." (p. 5)
nature, causes, or outcome of an event, theIf people, including joumalists, are uninformation that will t^e selected as most aware of the extent to which they seek to
useful is information that is consistent with confirm their expectations and theories, it
and confirming of one's theory.
may be in part because the processes that
Information that runs counter to one's allow this to happen operate below the level
theories is discounted a number of ways. For of consciousness. Reporters may honestly
one thing, disconfirming evidence may be believe they are objectively considering all
regarded as transient or situationally induced. sides to an issue, while in practice they are
For example, a political figure who is thought processing information in a way that conto be honest and forthright and who is then firms what they expect or believe.
caught in lies about events may be regarded
as momentarily confused, or without recall, Misperccptions of riskor perhaps induced to perform dishonestly
Every day, on the news, from their friends,
by misguided advisers or the pressure of in the movies, people hear about risk — theoffice (Ross, Lepper & Hubbard, 1975). Even risk of diseases, natural disasters, technologiif joumalists themselves do not interpret ac- cal mishap>s, nuclear war, auto emissions,tions in this way, they may regard such p>assive smoke. And, based on what theyinterpretations by others as highly credible hear, people perceive some risks as greaterand so give them prominent play.
than others. But are they right'
Secondly, disconfirming evidence may be
Psychologists have done a great deal ofregarded as arising from poor or shoddy research on pieople's perceptions of risk insources. Thus, one may be particularly recent years, and their findings include thecritical of the methodology of the disconfir- following:ming study, and, in fact, so critical that the•Anything that makes a hazard appear
study may be discarded as entirely unreli- very memorable or imaginable, such as aable. Reporters may similarly discard sources recent disaster, vivid film, or media coverage,(persons or resources for data) that are dis- can influence one's perception of risk; thus,
confirming of their theories by virtue of their someone who has just seen the movie "Jaws"
judged unreliability.
may overestimate the probability of being
Fishman (1980), in his account of how a attacked by sharks on their vacation to theseries of events in New York City came to be ocean, and someone who has just seen "Thelinked together as a "crime wave," noted that Towering Inferno" may overestimate theonce a crime wave was established in jour- probability of being killed in a high rise fire.
nalists' minds it took on a life of its own,
•People overestimate the risk of deathguiding reporters' perceptions of hitherto un- from dramatk: or sensational causes, such as
connected crimes and city polke officers' as homicide, accidents, cancer, and natural diswell. "A week and a half after the coverage asters, and underestimate the risk of death
EDUCATOR/SPRIMQ 1 9 8 9from undramatic causes such as diabetes,
emphysema, and asthma, causes which kill
one at a time and are common in nonfatal
form.
•When people lack strong opinions abouta hazard, they are highly suscep>tible to theway risk information is presented; thus, theway information is framed (whether, forexample, one says "only about one percentof the nation's five million chemical processing units handle hazardous waste materials
that could result in runaway reaaions," or "asmany as 50,000 of the nation's five million
chemical processing units handles hazardous
waste materials...") can have a major effect onperceptions.
In short, researchers have found thatp>eople have a great deal of difficulty accurately perceiving risk (Slovic, 1986).
Not surprisingly, some of these samedifficulties have revealed themselves in news
media coverage of risk (cT., Combs & Slovk:,
1979). Thus, it appears that joumalists, likelay perceivers, process risk information poorly.
"Reporters obviously need to be educatedin the importance and subtleties of riskstories," psychologist Paul Slovic has written
in an article deuiling some of the difficulties
inherent in informing and educating the
public about risk (Slovic, 1986). In obvious
agreement, a number of psychologists, masscommunication researchers, and other groups
have produced materials and events, including articles, p>amphlets, films, and workshops, to help reporters undersund andclarify risk issues(c.f., Fischoff, 1985a, 1985b;
Risk Reporting Projert, 1986; Institute for
Health Policy Analysis, 1984).
Since the news media are a dominantsource of information about risk, it seems
incumbent upon journalism educators to alert
students to the ways in which they may err(and be influenced by the intentional andunintentional errors and biases of sources) as
they process information about risk. It also
seems incumbent upon us to alert them tosome of the ways they can minimize such
errors and biases.

Sample errors and biases
Although journalism educators have rec-8

ognized for some time the need for journalists to pay attention to biases in formal poll
data (c.f., Wilhoit & Weaver, 1980), they havegiven relatively little attention to the need forjoumalists to attend to sampling biases inother realms, though they probably should.
Researchers have found, for example, thatpeople can and often do ignore biases inexisting samples of information (Fiske &Taylor, 1984).
In one of the few textbook examples ofthis shortcoming in joumalism,Tankard (1976)
points to how joumalists covered the Watergate hearings during the 1970s. One reporter,using letters reportedly sent to Senator Ervin's
committee, concluded that televised hearings were appreciated by audiences, while
another reporter, judging from call-ins to
television sutions, concluded just the opposite (pp. 51-52). Apparently, neither reporter
stopped to consider the inherent biases in thesamples they drew upon in reaching theirconclusions.

Misunderstanding of regression
People have a poor understanding ofregression, the fact that extreme events will,on the average, be less extreme when observed again. As a result, they often use
extreme events to predict future extreme
events (Jennings, Amabile, & Ross, 1982). In
joumalism, regression effects are sometimes
appreciated, as when a literary critic raves
atK>ut a first book but at the same time urges
readers to wait for the next book because
previous experience suggests that second
novels often are not as good as first ones.
However, other times they may not be appreciated, as when reporters herald the first very
positive results of a study on a new drug. The
study may show px>sitive results, even great
results, but it is only one study, and chancealone may have accounted for the findings.

Hindsight bias
Psychologists have found that once people
leam the outcome of an event, they tend to
exaggerate their ability to have foreseen it.
Thus, in one experiment, students were asked
to predia the likelihood of various possible
outcomes of President Nixon's forthcoming
EDUCATOR/SPRINQ 1 9 8 9

trips to Moscow and Peking. When, in thewake of Nixon's journey, the students were
unexpectedly asked to recall their initial
predictions, they remembered them as very
close to what they now knew had happened(Fischoff & Beyth, 1975). This tendency tooverestimate what could have been foreseen
is known as the "hindsight bias" or the "Iknew-it-all-along" phenomenon, and it seems
to have been operating in much of the post
hoc moralizing about journalistic coverage ofthe shuttle disaster (I knew or would have
known, so others should have too); it may
also have been operating when Sen. William
Proxmire bestowed "Golden Fleece" awards
on research that documented or explored the"obvious," though many joumalists didn't
recognize the fact.

Illusory correlation
Sometimes, psychologists have found,people greatly overestimate the frequency
with which two characteristics or events are
related, or they even impose a relationshipwhere none exists (c.f., Crocker, 1981; Jennings, Amabile, & Ross, 1982). This phenomenon, known as illusory correlation, hasbeen demonstrated in a number of circumsunces, but particularly when two things
happen to be associated in meaning. Thus,
if joumalists commonly associate "longhairs"with demonstrations (that is, they expect tosee people with long hair at demonstrations),
they may overestimate the frequency withwhich long-haired people attend such events.
Likewise, if reporters associate universitybased artists with sute grants for the arts, they
may overestimate the frequency with whichsuch artists (as distinct from communitybased artists) have been awarded such grants.

'. . . we put great stockin observable facts
without adequately
emphsizing some of theways observations canvary and err.'
lems; if there is an increase in birth defects
following a chemical accident, it would appear
that the increase must be due to the accident.
In the face of such strong prior expectations,
it may never even occur to the reporter thata simple increase in the birth rate may havecaused the unusually high number of defects.

Fundzimental attribution error

In journalism texts and journalism classrooms, we do considerable ulking about
journalists' role as "interpreters" of behavior
and events; we tell students not only to reportbehavior and events but also to explain thereasons behind behavior and events. But for
many of us, that is as far as our training Ukes
us. We provide no real undersUnding ofwhat goes into making causal inferences andthe biases and errors that can, and often do,
occur. As a result, we send out students who,in their role as interpreters, are likely to commit a number of cognitive errors. Some ofthese errors are documented in attribution
theory research, which concems how people
make causal inferences about their own andothers* behavior.
Research on one such error, the ubiquiSome of the research on illusory correla- tous "fundamenul attribution error," sugtion (c.f.. Chapman & Chapman, 1982) ap- gests that one is more likely to attributepears to suggest that expecutions can also another person's behavior to his or her own
lead people to impose illusory causal (as disp>ositional qualities than to situational
distinct from simple correlational) relation- factors (Jones & Hanis, 1967). Thus, reportships between characteristics or events. ers discovering a case of scientific fraud at
Consider the journalist who notices that an their local university are more likely to exabnormally high number of children living plore the theory that the person was a "badnear a chemical spill have been bom with apple" than to explore the theory that thebirth defects. In the reporter's mind, chemi- "barrel itself was rotten." There are docucal accidents often cause human health prob- mented exceptions to the fundamenul attri-

EDUCATOR/SPRIMQ 1989

bution error, of course, but the tendency
needs to be recognized.

Conclusion
There are numerous other documented
biases and errors in people's thinking (seeFiske & Taylor, 1984). But our point, wehope, has been made: In most skills courses
and most joumalism texts, we put great stockin observable facts without adequately
emphasizing some of the ways observations
can vary and err. We warn our students to bewary of their own biases, but we appear to dovery little to demonstrate how easily biases
and prior exp>ectations can affect their selection of data. We encourage students to"personalize" the news but fail to warn themadequately of the dangers, often unwittingly
reinforcing the cognitive tendency to favorcase histories or anecdotal information overimportant base rate information. In the samevein, we encourage coverage of activities thatpose social or environmenul risks, yet say
little or nothing about the errors p>eoplecommonly make when assessing risk. In
these and many other small ways, we may be
unknowingly failing our students and our
profession.
The need — to leam more about such
errors and biases, and to bring what we know
and leam into the educational setting — isgreat. Admittedly, it may not be easy. Mostof us have all we can do in a term to teachstudents the traditk>nal fundamentals of interviewing, observation, and mining documents. To bring this knowledge into theclassroom successfully will require us todevelop exercises that will provide opportunities for learning about cognitive distortions
without sacrificing the basics.
Teachers' manuals for undergraduate texts
in social [psychology often contain exercisesfor demonstrating such errors and biases;
some of these might be modified for use inwriting, rep>orting, and editing classes, butothers will have to be developed from scratch.
We must also work to integrate this andrelated knowledge into traditional joumalism
textbooks. Some materials produced bycognitive social psychologists are accessible
enough to use as readings for undergraduate

10joumalism majors(c.f., Loftus, 1979; SUnovich,1986), but most are not. It is imperative thatthose capable of translating psychologicalresearch be involved in producing and testing classroom-appropriate materials.
Whether joumalists and joumalists-in-training will be receptive to efforts to meet thisneed is another matter; another cognitive
tendency that psychologists have documented
is the "overconfkdence phenomenon," or thetendency for people to overestimate the accuracy of their judgments (Fischoff, Slovk: &Lichtenstein, 1977). Also uncertain is whether
joumalisls, even if receptive, will be able toinhibit these errors and biases, pnrtknilarly
under time constraints, which have beenfound to exaggerate such problems (Kruglanski & Freund, 1983).
Still, there is evidence that, at least undersome circumstances, fjeople can inhibit someof these biases. Simply telling p>eople to beunbiased won't lessen people's tendency tomaintain a theory in the face of disconfirming
evklence. However, some research suggeststhat telling people to consider carefully how
they are evaluating evidence and to watch
their biases as they go through the process ofinterpreting dau does help G-ord, Lepper, &Thompson, 1980). Asking people to explain
why the theory might be wrong has also
worked in some experiments (Anderson,1982).
By doing nothing, we can be almost
certain that joumalists, to the extent that they
do make these misukes, will be condemnedto repeat them.
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EDUCATOR/SPRIMQ 1989

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