Asenteellisuus

Asenteellisuus is a Finnish term designating attitudinal bias: the tendency to interpret information, events, and other people through one's preconceptions and dispositions, which can lead to biased judgments, inferences, and actions. The word combines asenne (attitude) with the suffix -ellisuus to describe a quality or tendency. The concept is used across social sciences to refer to the way beliefs and values shape perception and evaluation, often without full awareness.

Asenteellisuus manifests when people's prior attitudes influence attention to evidence, the selection and interpretation of data, or the framing of arguments. It can occur intentionally, such as in advocacy or propaganda, or unintentionally as part of everyday reasoning. Related ideas include motivated reasoning, confirmation bias, selective exposure, and ideological bias. The phenomenon is particularly salient in politics, media, and public discourse, where attitudes toward issues or actors color judgments about information and sources.

Research on asenteellisuus draws on psychology, communication studies, and political science. Methods include experiments, surveys, content and discourse analysis, and cognitive testing to measure the impact of attitudes on interpretation. Debiasing strategies focus on increasing awareness of biases, promoting critical thinking, exposing people to counter-evidence, perspective-taking, and using structured analytic techniques or preregistration to reduce selective reasoning.

In Finnish discourse, asenteellisuus is used to critique or analyze how attitudes shape interpretation, and how media and institutions may contribute to polarization. It is treated as a normal feature of human cognition, with emphasis on recognizing and mitigating its effects in reasoning, communication, and decision-making.