Bias blind spot
Recognising biases in other people while believing you are less affected by them yourself.
What drives it
Protects the sense of being rational and fair. Biases work outside awareness, so introspection finds nothing; other people's biases are inferred from their behaviour, which you can see.
How it shows
Work
The leader who sends the team on bias training and skips it. 'I'm a good judge of character' as the reason for not using structured interviews. Naming others' conflicts of interest readily while treating your own as irrelevant to your judgement. Knowing the list of biases, including this one, does not exempt you.
Relationships
'You're projecting.' Partners who can describe each other's patterns in detail and stay unaware of their own.
Self
Your evidence for being fair is introspective: 'I checked and I'm not favouring him.' Introspection cannot detect bias; only outcomes or blind procedures can.
What tells it apart
Naive realism: Naive realism treats your view of a disputed event as plain fact; the blind spot is the narrower claim that you are less biased than others, which people make even about matters they hold loosely.
Dunning-Kruger effect: Dunning-Kruger is overestimation of skill by low performers in one domain; the blind spot affects people at every skill level and concerns objectivity, not competence.
Self-enhancement: Self-enhancement inflates many self-ratings at once; people who rate themselves modestly on other traits still rate themselves less biased than average.
A test
Use a procedure that hides who is who (blind review, structured scoring) and compare its results with your usual judgements; a difference is the bias you did not detect.
Questions to carry
- When names and faces are hidden, how do the scores compare with the usual judgements of the same people?
- Which bias do I spot easily in others and find no trace of when I look at myself?
How strong the research is
moderate. Robust in lab studies and measurable as an individual difference, but less is known about how much it predicts real decisions, and higher cognitive ability does not reduce it.
Where it comes from
Emily Pronin, Daniel Lin and Lee Ross, 2002; Irene Scopelliti and colleagues, 2015 (individual differences)