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Abstract People think that they see things as they are in “objective reality,” and they impute bias and other negative qualities to those who disagree. Evidence for these tendencies initially emerged in the domain of politics, where people tend to assume that there are objectively correct beliefs and positions. The present research shows that people are confident in the correctness of their views, and they negatively judge those who disagree, even in the seemingly “subjective” domain of art. Across seven experiments, participants evaluated paintings and encountered others who agreed or disagreed with their evaluations. Participants saw others' evaluations as less objective when they clashed with their own, and as more influenced by biasing factors like conformity or financial incentives. These aesthetic preferences felt as objective as political preferences. Reminding people of their belief that artistic preferences are “matters of opinion” reduced this thinking, but did not eliminate it. These findings suggest that people's convictions of their own objectivity are so powerful as to extend to domains that are typically regarded as “subjective.” 

Three studies (1 survey, 2 experiments) examine cognitive biases in the professional judgments of nationally-representative samples of psychologists working in legal contexts. Study 1 (N= 84) demonstrates robust evidence of the bias blind spot (Pronin, Lin, & Ross, 2002) in experts’ judgments. Psychologists rated their own susceptibility to bias in their professional work lower than their colleagues (and laypeople). As expected, they perceived bias mitigating procedures as more threatening to their own domain than outside domains, and more experience was correlated with higher perceived threat of bias mitigating procedures. Experimental studies 2 (N=118) & 3 (N=128) with randomly-selected psychologists reveals psychologists overwhelmingly engage in confirmation bias (93% with one decision opportunity in study 1, and 90%, 87%, and 82% across three decision opportunities in study 2). Cognitive reflection was negatively correlated with confirmation bias. Psychologists were also susceptible to order effects in that the order of symptoms presented affected their diagnoses–even though the same symptoms existed in the different scenarios (in opposite orders).