What information should jurors have during court proceedings to render a just decision? Should politicians know who is donating money to their campaigns? Will scientists draw biased conclusions about drug efficacy when they know more about the patient or study population? The potential for bias in decision-making by physicians, lawyers, politicians, and scientists has been recognized for hundreds of years and drawn attention from media and scholars seeking to understand the role that conflicts of interests and other psychological processes play. However, commonly proposed solutions to biased decision-making, such as transparency (disclosing conflicts) or exclusion (avoiding conflicts) do not directly solve the underlying problem of bias and may have unintended consequences. Robertson and Kesselheim bring together a renowned group of interdisciplinary scholars to consider another way to reduce the risk of biased decision-making: blinding. What are the advantages and limitations of blinding? How can we quantify the biases in unblinded research? Can we develop new ways to blind decision-makers? What are the ethical problems with withholding information from decision-makers in the course of blinding? How can blinding be adapted to legal and scientific procedures and in institutions not previously open to this approach? Fundamentally, these sorts of questions—about who needs to know what—open new doors of inquiry for the design of scientific research studies, regulatory institutions, and courts. The volume surveys the theory, practice, and future of blinding, drawing upon leading authors with a diverse range of methodologies and areas of expertise, including forensic sciences, medicine, law, philosophy, economics, psychology, sociology, and statistics. Introduces readers to the primary policy issue this book seeks to address: biased decision-making. Provides a focus on blinding as a solution to bias, which has applicability in many domains. Traces the development of blinding as a solution to bias, and explores the different ways blinding has been employed. Includes case studies to explore particular uses of blinding for statisticians, radiologists, and fingerprint examiners, and whether the jurors and judges who rely upon them will value and understand blinding.

This Working Paper provides a framework for understanding how blinding may be a solution for institutional corruption, a situation where a funding dependency causes biased outcomes and thus a lack of trust. A funding dependency can be disaggregated into three functions: a subsidy, a selection of the decision maker, and an identification between the funder and the decision maker. These dynamics are shown in the settings of litigation witnesses, biomedical scientists, and candidates for public offices, all of whom may be biased by funding dependencies. Drawing from a long history of blinding in the biomedical sciences, blinding operates by allowing the subsidy function, while eliminating the selection and identification functions, which cause bias. In some settings, even the funders themselves will have self-interested reasons to prefer blinding over the status quo, which suggests the potential for market-based solutions to institutional corruption. Blinding is motivated by a recognition that a subsidy-dependency is sometimes unavoidable for practical reasons (including constitutional, political, economic realities), making a ban on conflicting interests unattainable. Blinding is also motivated by a recognition that other solutions to institutional corruption, such as professionalism and mandatory disclosure of conflicting interests, require strong assumptions about psychological capacities, which often fail. Blinding has its own limitations: some biasing functions cannot be disaggregated from the subsidy, and even if blinding works to eliminate bias, it may fail to rescue a dependent institution from perceptions of illegitimacy. Still, blinding should be understood as a primary tool in the fight against institutional corruption. The Working Paper concludes by showing how blinding strategies are a primary mechanism of the civil and criminal jury trial institution, which suggests other similar applications to minimize bias in other institutions.

This open access book, published under a CC BY 4.0 license in the Pubmed indexed book series Handbook of Experimental Pharmacology, provides up-to-date information on best practice to improve experimental design and quality of research in non-clinical pharmacology and biomedicine.

“Accessible and authoritative . . . While we may not have much power to eradicate our own prejudices, we can counteract them. The first step is to turn a hidden bias into a visible one. . . . What if we’re not the magnanimous people we think we are?”—The Washington Post I know my own mind. I am able to assess others in a fair and accurate way. These self-perceptions are challenged by leading psychologists Mahzarin R. Banaji and Anthony G. Greenwald as they explore the hidden biases we all carry from a lifetime of exposure to cultural attitudes about age, gender, race, ethnicity, religion, social class, sexuality, disability status, and nationality. “Blindspot” is the authors’ metaphor for the portion of the mind that houses hidden biases. Writing with simplicity and verve, Banaji and Greenwald question the extent to which our perceptions of social groups—without our awareness or conscious control—shape our likes and dislikes and our judgments about people’s character, abilities, and potential. In Blindspot, the authors reveal hidden biases based on their experience with the Implicit Association Test, a method that has revolutionized the way scientists learn about the human mind and that gives us a glimpse into what lies within the metaphoric blindspot. The title’s “good people” are those of us who strive to align our behavior with our intentions. The aim of Blindspot is to explain the science in plain enough language to help well-intentioned people achieve that alignment. By gaining awareness, we can adapt beliefs and behavior and “outsmart the machine” in our heads so we can be fairer to those around us. Venturing into this book is an invitation to understand our own minds. Brilliant, authoritative, and utterly accessible, Blindspot is a book that will challenge and change readers for years to come. Praise for Blindspot “Conversational . . . easy to read, and best of all, it has the potential, at least, to change the way you think about yourself.”—Leonard Mlodinow, The New York Review of Books “Banaji and Greenwald deserve a major award for writing such a lively and engaging book that conveys an important message: Mental processes that we are not aware of can affect what we think and what we do. Blindspot is one of the most illuminating books ever written on this topic.”—Elizabeth F. Loftus, Ph.D., distinguished professor, University of California, Irvine; past president, Association for Psychological Science; author of Eyewitness Testimony

Discover how to Get It Right in your Moments That Matter—when the situation is complex and relational—and the stakes are high. Transform the outcome of your most challenging situations and interactions when you feel— Threatened by charged emotions or uncertainty Paralyzed by fear of saying (or doing) the wrong thing (again) Defeated by a relationship that seems damaged beyond repair Perplexed about how to achieve the results you desire Stalled in progress with others due to differing styles and perspective. In an ever-changing environment when typical habits, behaviors, and thinking aren’t enough, Getting It Right When It Matters Most introduces research backed insight and a simple model for your most important situations. Apply self-awareness, learning agility, and emotional intelligence through the Self, Outlook, Action, and Reflection (SOAR) cycle.

This book explains statistics specifically for a medically literate audience. Readers gain not only an understanding of the basics of medical statistics, but also a critical insight into how to review and evaluate clinical trial evidence.

Psychological Science Under Scrutiny explores a range of contemporary challenges to the assumptions and methodologies of psychology, in order to encourage debate and ground the discipline in solid science. Discusses the pointed challenges posed by critics to the field of psychological research, which have given pause to psychological researchers across a broad spectrum of sub-fields Argues that those conducting psychological research need to fundamentally change the way they think about data and results, in order to ensure that psychology has a firm basis in empirical science Places the recent challenges discussed into a broad historical and conceptual perspective, and considers their implications for the future of psychological methodology and research Challenges discussed include confirmation bias, the effects of grant pressure, false-positive findings, overestimating the efficacy of medications, and high correlations in functional brain imaging Chapters are authored by internationally recognized experts in their fields, and are written with a minimum of specialized terminology to ensure accessibility to students and lay readers