Why being objective can make you biased

Recently I watched a video on the Idea Channel where the host answered a question from a user accusing him of saying that “everything internet culture related is good”. His answer was that he approached everything from a positive perspective to allow him to see the good without being too easily distracted by the bad ( I am paraphrasing). Mentally I corrected this to the common idea, driven by the scientific method, that you should be objective.

I don’t know why this statement with my mental fix bothered me, but it did, and I continued to think about it in the back of my mind. I realised that in fact I was wrong and that it is sometimes in fact necessary to be positive and not just objective when analysing a subject because without some form of motivation or positive outlook I would stop investigating the matter long before I have a conclusive model to objectively evaluate.

This attitude should of course be tempered because you can go to the other extreme where your positive outlook in fact obscures your analysis by overlooking or under estimating the bad parts. But the essences of the matter is that in fact as emotional humans we can’t help but be biased about subjects in some way. We can counter act this natural bias by first perceiving the bias and then compensating for it by going just a little bit too far in the other direction.

I think that going a biased outlook to the opposite side of our natural or first impression (over compensating) is not as dangerous as trying to be unbiased because, then we have to be much more alert to the outlook drift that can and will occur. By this I mean that if we try to stay neutral about a subject and we spend time with it we are bound to start to form opinions even if we try to stay unbiased but by constantly trying to go just a little bit against our natural view we are more focused on the actual facts and are more likely to see any drift that does occur because we are not in our comfort zone.

TL;DR

Being positive about a subject is a great way to insure that you are more motivated to keep studying it. Also try to push yourself to go a little against your view on a subject when analysing it, to force yourself to be more attuned to shifts in your view on the matter making it easier to end up with a clear, concise and unbiased (as far as possible) view on the matter. Also make sure that you are motivated to get to the truth and are not just doing “research” to support a pet idea you have by ignoring facts that does not fix with your idea. You have to understand both sides of the argument before you can make and informed decision.