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Abstract
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If you are reading this editorial, you are likely to be a highly educated, high-income individual living in a city, who reads English fluently, has easy access to the internet and a mobile phone, studies or works full-time and has a more-than-passing interest in transportation. You experience the world through your body - abled or disabled, gendered, with skin and hair associated with a particular genetic background. A lifetime of experiences has shaped your familiarity with the transport system. Perhaps you view this transport experience through a defining lens - personal experience with road trauma, an interest to particular mode of transport, or a physical disability. Or perhaps you believe that your experience in the transport system is a generic, "default" experience, more or less similar to your friends, colleagues and fellow human beings.
When researchers show up to work, we like to think that we leave that personal experience behind. We work hard to collect and analyse data in an unbiased way so that we can draw objective conclusions about the transport system and the people who use it. And yet research involving humans can never be truly objective. Every decision is touched by our subjective experience with the world, or our research positionality: which research questions capture our interest, which papers we read and cite, which methods we consider to be valid, which assumptions we make about those methods and how we interpret what we find (Nihan & Debbie, Citation2022).
The tendency to start from our own subjective experience of the world is a mental shortcut, or heuristic,Footnote1 called egocentric anchoring (Epley et al., Citation2004). Heuristics help us process the overwhelming amount of information we take in and the decisions we make every day. When we try to estimate something about the outside world, we often start from our own experience before adjusting based on other information. Yet that "adjustment" is usually still biased by our own experience. For example, a recent study of transport professionals in the US found that their experience of the transport network was much more urban and multi-modal than the average American. Moreover, this experience influenced their estimates of how other Americans use the transport system (Ralph & Delbosc, Citation2017)...
Language: en |