NAMI Washtenaw County

Overcoming Bias: Tools to Help you Navigate Mental Health Resources

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When you live with a mental health condition, or you love someone who does, you are often desperate to find information and resources that will help with personal education, treatment, and recovery. As you work to empower yourself with information, it’s important to examine the kinds of cognitive biases that can shape or limit our understanding of the information we are coming into contact with. NAMI Washtenaw volunteer, John Sepp, has developed two infographics to help you reflect on your biases and thought processes as you engage with information and resources about mental health.

John Sepp’s methods in Overcoming Bias: Approaching Information Effectively through Proper Reasoning Skills Motivated Reasoning: This is where we form or maintain a belief because we want it to be true. This can be displayed by accepting evidence confirming our beliefs, and subconsciously ignoring evidence that disconfirms them. Introspection Illusion: This is a misguided assumption that our own biases are transparent to us, and that we can diagnose them through introspection. We assume people are honest, and when conflict occurs, we assume they are biased. Optional Stopping: We have a tendency to allow the search for evidence to come to a close when convenient. This can skew the evidence, and we are more likely to stop looking when evidence found already confirms our beliefs. Evidence Primacy Effect: When information is gathered over time, we give early information more weight than late information, leading to confirmation bias, or even a failure to pay attention and interpret later evidence.

Further Reading

To learn more about these ideas, John invites you to visit the following links.

GreenBook Blog | Lessons from Thinking, Fast & Slow: System 1 and System 2

The Decision Lab | System 1 and System 2 Thinking

Psychology Today | Motivated Reasoning

verywellmind | What Is the Primacy Effect?

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