Bias in Search Terms
Almost every word we use carries a different shade of meaning. You might think that of a piece of clothing as old, but maybe I would describe it as vintage. Someone behaving a certain way might be perceived by one person as confident, but another person thinks they're arrogant.
You might not think it, but very subtle differences in the search terms we enter can have enormous impacts on the results we get. For example take the picture below:
Some people describe it as sunflowers, others as a sunflower field, while other people notice the barn and describe it as a sunflower farm. But these 3 phrases get completely different sets of results, (go ahead and try this in your favorite search engine).
- Sunflowers gets you info on how to grow sunflowers and general facts
- Sunflower field gets you mostly information on sunflower festivals and places to visit
- Sunflower farm gets you mostly information about local growing operations and other businesses with sunflower in the name
This really starts to matter when we are researching contentious topics where different groups have very different opinions that they each hold very strongly. It is very common for people on different sides of an issue to use different words to talk about the same thing. Consider the following example:
Both of these words refer to people who are in a country without having gone through the legal channels to obtain the paperwork required by law. But illegal aliens has a more negative and ominous connotation and is used more often by groups who oppose immigration generally or support stricter immigration controls. Undocumented immigrants is widely considered to be a more neutral term and is likely to be used by organizations who provide support services to immigrants.
The first article title above was pulled from an immigrant support organization, Immigrants Rising, and uses the term "undocumented immigrants." The second article title was pulled from an explicitly anti-immigration think tank, the Center for Immigration Studies. In addition to the term "illegals" in the headline, the term "illegal aliens" is used throughout the article.
When researching an issue you already have opinions on, it's very likely that the first search terms you think of will reflect the opinions you already hold. And that makes it more likely you will encounter search results that support your existing opinions. If we truly want to examine a wide range of opinions on a topic we may need to use many different search terms to retrieve results.
Challenge!
1. For the following pairs of words, which one do you think is more loaded and why?
agony OR discomfort
reduced OR slashed
offender OR criminal
2. Come up with 3 pairs of words on your own that refer to the same thing but that carry different baggage. Hint: controversial issues often have different names used by groups with different viewpoints, use some of the synonym finding strategies from Day 2 if you get stuck.