Is Your Objectivity Jacked? Everyday bias in bad decisions
August 11, 2010If you’re like most people, you like to think of yourself as someone who thinks clearly and objectively. Me too, until an recent event served as a lightening rod for appreciating our inability
to think without bias.
Recently, a former colleague and friend of my husband posted a FaceBook link to a newsletter that caused an uproar in our house. The newsletter cited the 1964 Civil Rights Act as and example of federal government intrusion into restaurants and movie houses – even creating an inability for people to decide who could be their neighbor.
With no doubt in his mind, my husband questioned his friend and was shocked when his colleague replied that he couldn’t see anything wrong with the article.
Here’s where it gets interesting…and creates huge potential for divided camps:
while he saw nothing wrong, I was profoundly upset by it! In 1939 the five-year old girl who would become my mother learned that she not allowed to swim in the community pool. Being told, “No Spics Allowed” haunted her and created devastating ripple effects. So it makes sense that I was offended but what I couldn’t fathom was that my husband’s colleague (the bright, kind, southern Christian man who posted it) reported reading the article three times and couldn’t see anything wrong with it. I shared how my bias caused such a negative reaction to the article but wondered, what’s his story…how can I understand his perspective just as I wish he understood mine?
Out of respect for me, this lovely man told my husband that he took the offending post down but: I don’t think that’s the answer…nor do I want to debate whether the article or our friend was a victim of bigoted bias or not – let’s simply use this real-life situation as a springboard for understanding.
The answer is to intercept our brains’ auto-pilot for bias.
Here’s How Objectivity Gets Jacked:
Hi-jacking: (reacting before thinking brain)
The amygdala or unevolved brain processes our perception and feelings as good or bad within milliseconds. This can cause a regrettable knee-jerk response cover in the previous post, “When Smart People Make JackAss Moves”. During an amygdala hi-jacking the emotions are so strong that our unevolved brain (the amygdala) takes over before the evolved executive brain (the prefrontal cortex) can process the information to regulate our response.
Example: My initial reaction to reading the offending post was shock and anger. I don’t think that I could have maintained a poker-face had we been face-to-face so the virtual exchange may have spared me from an amygdala hi-jacking and jackass move.
Even if we are able to hit the un-evolved brain “pause” button to allow our executive brain to analyze, our thinking may be jacked a second time!
Low-jacking: (interpretive bias brain)
After the amygdala does the initial good/bad processing, the executive brain (pre-frontal cortex) uses intelligence, data and previous experiences to assess whether the initial feelings and perception were accurate. Our executive brain’s thinking can be “low-jacked” (to access by an alternate means) by our sub-conscious tendency to latch-on to information that validates our initial perception and to filter out what doesn’t support it.
Examples:
- good or bad first impressions or prejudices (pre-judging) and how we may be more or less willing to give others a pass
- placebo effect and how we often get what we expect
- how remarkably bright people are unable to see the diverse perspectives of social, political, or religious issues
- how physicians’ training/time limitations add interpretive bias to a patient types and cause mis-diagnoses
- why a juror’s personal experience (aka bias) can impede their ability to impartially judge factual evidence.
The truth of our reality is that we don’t see things as they are – we see things as we are.
Sadly, our knee-jerk reactions and our filtered reasoning means that we access knowledge more selectively than objectively which often results in thinking that is, umm.. jacked.
The important discussion becomes, how does it hurt all of us and what can we do about it?
- When have you been on the receiving end of a jacked idea or decision?
- What can we do to prevent or minimize our the brain low-jackings that create interpretive bias?
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- Gladstone: A Taxonomy of Bias: The Cognitive Miser (lesswrong.com)
