The term "inherent bias" refers to the effect of underlying factors or assumptions that skew viewpoints a subject under discussion. There are multiple formal definitions of "inherent bias" which depend on the particular field of study.

In statistics

Statistics

Statistics is the study of the collection, organization, analysis, and interpretation of data. It deals with all aspects of this, including the planning of data collection in terms of the design of surveys and experiments....

, the term is used in relation to an inability to measure accuarately and directly what one would wish to measure, meaning that indirect measurements are used which might be subject to unknown distortions.

See also

• systemic bias
  Systemic bias
  Systemic bias is the inherent tendency of a process to favor particular outcomes. The term is a neologism that generally refers to human systems; the analogous problem in non-human systems is often called systematic bias, and leads to systematic error in measurements or estimates.-Bias in...
  
   and systematic bias, or cognitive bias
  Cognitive bias
  A cognitive bias is a pattern of deviation in judgment that occurs in particular situations. Implicit in the concept of a "pattern of deviation" is a standard of comparison; this may be the judgment of people outside those particular situations, or may be a set of independently verifiable...
  
  
• implicit assumption, paradigm shift
  Paradigm shift
  A Paradigm shift is, according to Thomas Kuhn in his influential book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions , a change in the basic assumptions, or paradigms, within the ruling theory of science...
  
  
• Hawthorne effect
  Hawthorne effect
  The Hawthorne effect is a form of reactivity whereby subjects improve or modify an aspect of their behavior being experimentally measured simply in response to the fact that they know they are being studied, not in response to any particular experimental manipulation.The term was coined in 1950 by...