Single Blind Spot Bias

A metaphor for a researcher's (or field's) one major, unconscious area of ignorance that systematically skews how they design experiments and interpret data. It's the one big thing they cannot see about their own assumptions—often their cultural, gendered, or economic viewpoint—which acts as a hidden lens distorting everything.

*Example: A 20th-century psychology field dominated by wealthy Western men designing studies on "human" motivation using only male undergraduates as subjects. Their single blind spot bias—assuming their experience was universal—led them to pathologize women and non-Westerners for differing.*

by Dumu The Void February 9, 2026

Triple-Blind Bias

An even more extreme form of methodological worship, where blinding the data analysts as well is believed to purify the study of all human contamination. This bias fosters the dangerous myth that science can and should be a fully automated, personality-free process, denying the essential role of interpretation, theory, and judgment in discovery.

Example: A journal priding itself on only publishing "triple-blind" studies, creating a culture where surprising, anomalous, or interpretively complex findings are rejected because they don't fit the sterile, bias-free narrative. Triple-blind bias can stamp out scientific creativity in the name of robotic rigor.

by Dumu The Void February 9, 2026

Double-Blind Bias

The assumption that a double-blind protocol is a flawless truth machine, creating an infallible "fact." This bias ignores how the study's fundamental design, question framing, population selection, and statistical analysis are all loaded with human choices and cultural values before the first pill is blinded.

*Example: Citing a double-blind study "proving" a new antidepressant works, while ignoring that the study only measured a narrow, questionnaire-defined "depression" over 8 weeks in a hand-picked cohort, excluding people with complex comorbidities. The double-blind bias mistakes a specific, constructed result for universal, contextless truth.*

by Dumu The Void February 9, 2026

Single-Blind Bias

Not just the flaw in a single-blind study, but the broader cultural bias that assumes a problem is solved once the subject's bias is controlled for. It ignores how the researcher's unchecked expectations, culture, and design choices still massively shape outcomes, creating an illusion of objectivity that is really just hidden subjectivity.

Example: A pharmaceutical company runs a study where patients don't know if they get the drug or placebo (single-blind), but the doctors hoping for a blockbuster drug do. Their unconscious encouragement of the treatment group skews results. The single-blind bias is the false confidence that blinding the subject alone guarantees neutrality.

by Dumu The Void February 9, 2026

Confirmation Bias Blind Spot

The cognitive inability to recognize one's own confirmation bias while easily detecting it in others. This is the meta-bias that makes confirmation bias so resistant to correction. You can see how your political opponent selectively reads news; you cannot see how you do the same. The blind spot is structural: self-awareness requires a neutral vantage point, but there is no such vantage point. You cannot step outside your own confirmation processes because those processes are what constitute your reasoning.

Confirmation Bias Blind Spot Example: "I read diverse sources and follow the evidence wherever it leads. My opponent, however, lives in an echo chamber." This statement, sincerely believed, is the Confirmation Bias Blind Spot speaking. The speaker cannot perceive the filters they apply—the choice of which "diverse sources" to trust, which "evidence" to weight heavily, which conclusions "logically follow." Their bias is not in their data; it's in their algorithm for processing data. And algorithms cannot see themselves.

by Dumu The Void February 11, 2026