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What is the difference between perspective and bias? – Transcript
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- Perspective is defined as the point of view from which someone sees an event, and everyone holds a specific perspective.
- Bias is the intentional use of language to present a clearly one-sided and often unfair description of an event or person.
- While knowing a source's perspective can lead you to expect a particular kind of bias, you must identify specific word choices to prove bias.
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welcome back to another history skills video today i'm going to explain the difference between two source analysis skills used in the history classroom one of the most common mistakes made by students when analyzing sources is to confuse perspective and bias while the two analysis skills are related they are very different this video will hopefully make the distinction between the two clear so that you'll never again confuse the two firstly let's look at perspective perspective is the point of view from
which someone sees an event everyone has a specific perspective on the events they describe as a result two different sources can talk about two different things or describe the same things in different ways what is important to remember is that just because two sources produce different versions of an event does not mean that one is necessarily more right or wrong than the other they just saw things from a different point of view for example a parent and a child could visit a museum together
after the visit someone might ask them what kinds of things were in the museum the parent might describe the great paintings by famous artists while the child might talk about the various toys in the museum souvenir shop even though the two answers are different neither of them is wrong they simply experienced the same event differently because they had two different perspectives one had the perspective of a parent and the other had the perspective of a child here are some common kinds of
perspectives in historical sources nationality like american and japanese profession like university professor soldier or something similar political persuasion conservative communist etc cultural background perhaps egyptian european or something like that gender male female and so forth religious beliefs like christian or muslim or educational background so a particular university or business that they work for
now let's look at bias bias by comparison is an intentional use of language to present a clearly one-sided and often unfair description of the event or person this is most frequently seen the kinds of adjectives or nouns a source uses to describe events when identifying bias it is crucial that you are able to point to specific words from the source to prove that they're either strongly in favor of or strongly against the person or event they're describing
for example in the description of an ancient battle between the romans and the greeks a roman author could describe the greeks as villains or pathetic cowards the use of those negative word choices shows a deliberate attempt by the writer to present a clearly one-sided description of the events the author is clearly demonstrating an anti-greek bias similarly the same author could describe the romans as heroes or unfailingly brave the use of positive descriptions shows a
clearly pro-roman bias so how are perspective and bias related as you can now clearly see perspective and bias are two different things perspective is the point of view from which a source sees things but bias is an intentional use of language to present a one-sided description of something however the two are somewhat related once you identify the perspective of a source you may naturally expect that they demonstrate a particular kind of bias in the example about the battle between
the romans and the greeks from before once you know that the creator of a source has a roman perspective you can start to guess that they may show some bias about a battle involving their countrymen however until you can identify specific word choices in the source that demonstrate bias you cannot automatically jump to the conclusion that the source is biased what you'll often find is that even though you have determined the perspective of a source it doesn't show any clear bias for you to find i hope that you are now feeling
comfortable about the difference between perspective and bias in historical sources if you'd like to explore each skill in more detail i have provided links below to two other videos i've made one on perspective and the other on bias also if you need further explanations examples and advice you can visit the historyskills.com website i'll see you next time you