Errol Morris The Most Curious Thing

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Imagine a photo that makes you ponder a person’s actions and morals, triggering questions regarding what actually happened and why. This is exactly the case that is presented in Errol Morris’ “The Most Curious Thing.” In this chapter, Morris talks about Sabrina Harman, an essential character who played a role in the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. He delves into how people’s opinions of her are influenced by biases such as the confirmation bias and the hindsight bias. However, the bias that is extremely fitting in this context is the hindsight bias. Hindsight bias is where people look back at an event and convince themselves that the outcome was obvious. This essay will look more into the hindsight bias and how it shapes people’s perspectives and …show more content…

Overall, they criticized Sabrina with the benefit of the hindsight bias, not thinking further as to what information she had at the time. In conclusion, the case of Sabrina Harman shows how influential the media can be in influencing the public. Dramatic stories and images that catch the eye of the public tend to create confusing views, which can cause biased judgments as well as illogical viewpoints. To sum it all up, the case of Sabrina Harman shows how the media and hindsight bias heavily influence the views of the public. The focus that the media put on the stories and images of Sabrina’s actions led to unfair judgment. Hindsight bias made this worse by missing the moral and legal elements of her case and by making people use their current knowledge to judge past events. Going forward, one solution people can follow in order to not fall into the hindsight bias is to carefully analyze the information that is being said or read. This can guarantee a better understanding of the events that are happening around us, like Sabrina’s case. Her case demonstrates how the media and hindsight bias can cause differing views of the public as well as modify the levels of

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