People’s everyday life is filled with interactions and information exchange. However, the objectivity of the perceptions and attitudes of the information is hindered by numerous biases that are influenced by multiple factors. These factors include upbringing, social background, religious beliefs, experience, developmental level, and others. Therefore, an individual’s judgment might be significantly affected by the scope of beliefs he or she possesses, thus making his or her opinion biased.
If one insisted that psychology is only common sense, it would mean that the person is impacted by confirmation bias. This means that the person’s decision concerning the relevance of psychology as a science is hindered by his or her belief that it is just common sense and inability to recognize opposing views. Another example of confirming bias is when an individual reads journal articles or social media publications that apprise an individual he or she likes. The facts this person perceives are congruent with prior beliefs, which tend to be reinforced regardless of the existence of opposing facts.
A similar bias is hindsight bias that refers to the tendency of a person to believe that the events that have happened could have been predicted. This bias is also related to the existing beliefs and experiences of a person that encourage him or her to categorize events without objective ground. An example might be a situation when a person is answering a question the response to which he or she does not know. Once he or she finds out that the answer was wrong, they say that they knew so. Both types of bias influence the emergence of assumptions and stereotypes that diminish the opportunities for objective judgment and unprejudiced decision-making.