Cognitive Biases and Errors as Cause—and Journalistic Best Practices as Effect

Christian, Sue Ellen

doi:10.1080/08900523.2013.794674

Cited by 6 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 37 publications

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“…Lasorsa and Dai (2007) also found strong support for automaticity of stereotyping by demotivated reporters to produce accurate stories compared to more aware and engaged journalists. Urging for introducing more awareness strategies about their cognition failures, researchers stress the need for journalists to be taught about their cognitive biases just like they are taught ethics, in order to help them consciously avoid biased decisions (Stocking and Gross 1989;Christian 2013;Trumbo, Dunwoody, and Griffin 1998). Explaining to journalists how their own minds work is an important need of journalism pedagogy in the challenging atmosphere of journalism (Christian 2013).…”

Section: A Possible Solutionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Urging for introducing more awareness strategies about their cognition failures, researchers stress the need for journalists to be taught about their cognitive biases just like they are taught ethics, in order to help them consciously avoid biased decisions (Stocking and Gross 1989;Christian 2013;Trumbo, Dunwoody, and Griffin 1998). Explaining to journalists how their own minds work is an important need of journalism pedagogy in the challenging atmosphere of journalism (Christian 2013). Boscardin (2015) also highlights the need for increasing self-awareness in students' curriculums as a concrete method towards reducing the undesirable influence of implicit bias.…”

Section: A Possible Solutionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Curbing Journalistic Gender Bias: How Activating Awareness of Gender Bias in Indian Journalists Affects Their Reporting

Kalra

Boukes

2020

Journalism Practice

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This study examines the effect of gender bias awareness on journalistic decision-making. The study establishes a link between activating journalists' awareness of their implicit gender bias and objective decision making. Using a randomised experimental setup, journalists were (or were not) administered an Implicit Association Test (IAT) to ascertain their implicit gender bias, followed by decision-making vignettes to measure their explicit gender bias in journalistic reporting. Results indicate that inducing awareness of implicit gender bias through the IAT strongly reduces the production of biased journalistic content. The experiment highlights that journalists who are made aware of their implicit cognitive biases before making the journalistic decisions are more sensitive to avoid cognitive bias errors as compared to the control group of journalists who are not made aware of them. While offering a novel experimental framework for exposing journalistic bias, these results help ascertain solutions for curbing bias in journalism.

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Section: A Possible Solutionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: A Possible Solutionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Curbing Journalistic Gender Bias: How Activating Awareness of Gender Bias in Indian Journalists Affects Their Reporting

Kalra

Boukes

2020

Journalism Practice

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“…Outside work by journalists may lead to conflicts of interest, yet the journalism profession has reached no conclusion on how to deal with the issue. Christian (2013) argued that the SPJ ethics code’s assertion to counteract cognitive processes such as stereotyping and confirmation bias could reflect the authors’ own cognitive biases, and not be necessarily motivated by a pursuit of truth.…”

Section: The Journalist As Gatekeepermentioning

confidence: 99%

The Ethical Algorithm: Journalist/Whistleblower Relationships Explored Through the Lens of Social Exchange

Waters

2020

Journalism & Communication Monographs

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This study examined the ethical and professional judgments journalists consider when deciding to trust a whistleblower and determined how whistleblowers influence ethical and newsgathering processes. With a qualitative study, this research uncovered common ethical and procedural considerations journalists, who are influenced by gatekeeping forces, make when presented with information from a whistleblower, with the goal to create a conceptual model—an “ethical algorithm”—that journalists employ when deciding to publish whistleblower disclosures. In addition, the decision to build a trust relationship with a whistleblower is examined from the frameworks of ethical considerations, professional standards, and ethics codes. Finally, the journalist–whistleblower relationship is considered as a form of social exchange, a negotiated relationship in which parties determine trust as a result of an exchange of mutually beneficial acts.

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“…Yet, cognitive influences on journalistic work have been relatively underexplored. A recent study [ 22 ] discussed the inevitable errors and cognitive biases in journalists’ work and suggested several ways professional journalists and educators could address the pervasive impact of cognitive biases on news reporting. While these studies highlight that cognitive biases can appear in the work of journalists, the impact of cognitive biases in journalistic work is often assumed or implied.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Anchoring in the past, tweeting from the present: Cognitive bias in journalists’ word choices

Lee

Hamilton

2022

PLoS ONE

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This study examines journalists’ language in their reporting and what their word choices reveal about their cognitive mindsets. Reporters on the campaign trail often cannot afford to engage in systematic information processing as they distill complex political situations under deadline pressures. Twitter’s emphasis on speed and informal cultural milieu can further lead journalists to rely on heuristics and emotions. Drawing upon insights from theories of the mind, memory, and language, this study explores how cognitive biases are embodied in journalistic work across different media. We built a large-scale dataset of text corpora that consisted of more than 220,000 news articles, broadcast transcripts, and tweets generated over a year by 73 campaign reporters in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Leveraging this unique dataset of journalistic outputs from a campaign season, we conducted automated text analyses. Results suggest that heuristics and intuitive thinking played a significant role in the generation of content on Twitter. Journalists infused their tweets with more emotion, compared to when they appeared in traditional media such as newspapers and broadcasts. Journalists’ tweets contained fewer words related to analytical and long-term thinking than their writing. Journalists also used informal language in their tweets to connect with their audiences in more personal and casual manners. Across all media examined in the study, journalists described the current race by drawing upon their experience of covering prior presidential elections, a form of anchoring heuristic. This study extends the use of cognitive biases in politics to a new realm, reporting, and shows how journalists’ use of language on the campaign trail reflects cognitive biases that arise when individuals make decisions under time pressure and uncertainty.

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Cognitive Biases and Errors as Cause—and Journalistic Best Practices as Effect

Cited by 6 publications

References 37 publications

Curbing Journalistic Gender Bias: How Activating Awareness of Gender Bias in Indian Journalists Affects Their Reporting

Curbing Journalistic Gender Bias: How Activating Awareness of Gender Bias in Indian Journalists Affects Their Reporting

The Ethical Algorithm: Journalist/Whistleblower Relationships Explored Through the Lens of Social Exchange

Anchoring in the past, tweeting from the present: Cognitive bias in journalists’ word choices

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