The problem of myside bias in football debates
A thread
A thread
If you’re following my account since a long time already. You might remember the period when I was doing tons of threads like “why x player is better than y player” or “why x player is under/over rated”. However I stopped doing them, and I won’t ever restart, why ?
Because of… bias
First of all, bias is not necessarily bad, it can create an enjoyable atmosphere for fans. However, its negatives impacts are much bigger, especially for people who who like to observe and actually understand football.
First of all, bias is not necessarily bad, it can create an enjoyable atmosphere for fans. However, its negatives impacts are much bigger, especially for people who who like to observe and actually understand football.
To introduce the subject, I will present you a part of Elizabeth Kolbert’s article titled “Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds” discussing biases and the limitation of reason, she is using multiple experiences and I will show one of them.
At Stanford, two groups of students having opposed opinions about capital punishment were presented two (false) studies, one providing data in favour of capital punishment and an other against it.
At the end of the experiment, the students all considered the study proving their point as credible while qualifying the one disproving it as unconvincing. It is called “myside bias”.
Let’s come back to our case, we’re in December 2021 and I just posted a graph of prog carries x passes. Now, you check the replies and notice that users with Messi pfp’s all give positive replies unlike ones with Ronaldo’s who are giving hate comments. What do you make of that ?
I can’t know if my graph is useful or not as there is a clear correlation between positive comments and Messi pfp’s, opposite for Ronaldo’s. Now, do I consider Messi fans better because they liked my graph ? No, as they say it because it proves their main point, myside bias.
When those 2 fanbases were young, they picked a favourite, either Ronaldo/Madrid or Messi/Barca, they were probably like 6 years old and have built bias from this. Now as they grow up, they search every piece of information to make their idol look good, completely irrational.
An other example who follows E. Kolbert’s article even more is how *some* Ronaldo fans think that FBref is non fiable unlike Messi fans who think that it’s perfect. This is exactly the same phenomenon as the experience with the false studies about capital punishment.
I now don’t even pay attention to good/bad comments anymore, especially from those fanbases but not only, myside bias works with all. I try to only focus on replies from people not affiliated to a toxic player FC and who use critical thinking.
This was a descriptive thread, not a problem solving one.
It’s just a subject that I wanted to talk about to at least make you realize how fake this entire football debate thing is
It’s just a subject that I wanted to talk about to at least make you realize how fake this entire football debate thing is
Also I know that some people will say that I take this too seriously and that I should enjoy watching football more, but doing this type of descriptive thread about human logic is what I like doing the most, and yes it’s just Twitter at the end.
جاري تحميل الاقتراحات...