One issue that has emerged from the always-biased, political hearings for Sotomayor is the contention that a judge's decision can be/or at least should be, made without being biased by personal history, experience, political leanings, etc. She stressed this, while the Republicans want to say that her statements imply that, as a "wise Latina" she will let her experiences/perspective over-rule the letter of the law. Can such judgments (legal or clinical) be made without bias? Many apparently feel that such biases need to be brought to self-awareness and then willfully controlled. Ahhh, what a historically interesting conception of volition, consciousness, and "will-power" eh? I am sure at least one tipster would see this as a eurocentric bias. Much social-cognitive psych research would seem to suggest that cognitive and social biases are not so easily overcome, indeed, they make up the very way we apprehend our task, but that most consider themselves to be less vulnerable than others or those "average" others. See http://www.mindhacks.com/ for reference to Emily Pronin's recent research on the self-serving nature of this bias about one's biases. Sotomayor contends that a good judge should be self-aware and take into account such potential biases of background or perspective. Is this possible? Is it valuable to at least attempt? What does one do here? Is this like an attempt to cognitively suspend one's biases, weight it differently, separate it, or somehow subtract it from one's judgment? This may indeed be relevant to various qualitative research efforts where the observer attempts to suspend or bracket, and otherwise make apparent to oneself or others, the nature of the approach or naive perspective with which one comes to describe/observe the phenomenon in question. Hasn't social-cognitive research played a role in training judges better, or exploring ways to help them see how they may have actually weighted information versus how they think they have? Anyway, I thought such issues might be of use in class discussion regarding social-cognitive biases and how psych research is relevant to various forms of professional judgment and training. Gary
Gerald L. (Gary) Peterson, Ph.D. Professor, Department of Psychology Saginaw Valley State University University Center, MI 48710 989-964-4491 peter...@svsu.edu --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly (bsouthe...@frostburg.edu)
