Is Your Objectivity Jacked? Everyday bias in bad decisions

If 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)

Who is Defining Your Success? Part I

What IS Success?

A “Think Quick” challenge: Right this second, can you state your definition of success?

Most people think they know but few are able to define what success really means when applied to their own lives. And if YOU can’t define it, then WHO IS defining it for you?

If you can’t DEFINE success – how can you DESIGN success?

This quick clip (<2 minutes) of a TED talk by Alain DeBotton creates a great springboard to consider what YOUR idea of success is.

In view of DeBotton’s point about who creates our ideas of success, consider the Merriam Webster Dictionary’s definition:

1 -  obsolete: outcome, result
2  – degree or measure of succeeding b : favorable or desired outcome; also : the attainment of wealth, favor, or eminence
3 -  one that succeeds

I was both surprised and saddened to see how the original, now obsolete definition  has evolved (or devolved) from generic goal achievement to encompass fortune and/or fame. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that there is anything wrong with fortune or fame. Like DeBotton, I’m very interested in success. What I’m proposing is that success as defined by worldly standards is often at the root of many a deathbed regret. We simply need to have clarity around what we truly value in order to define success in our own terms.

In his book, Is the American Dream Killing You? Paul Stiles eloquently captures this: “Success in America is neither moral or spiritual nor intellectual nor artistic these days, but financial. Unsure of what they stand for, people rely on money as the criterion for value…people deserve respect and admiration because they are rich. What used to be a medium of exchange has usurped the place of fundamental values…the cult of success has replaced a belief in principles.”

Many who have never questioned or defined success strive to “live the dream” only to awaken to the nightmare of a self-imposed prison consisting of a burn-out job to pay for a big mortgage, serious credit card debt and/or an empty family life. DeBotton talks about the “notion of work-life balance nonsense” – that we can’t have it all and I quite agree.  That’s exactly why clarity is vital to prevent burnout and/or rude wake-ups from what we thought was “our” dream.  He urges us to be the authors of our own ambition by probing to ensure that our ideas of success are truly our own.

Some folks want to simply hire a coach to tell them how to be successful but this work cannot be delegated. Trying to hire-out defining and designing your success is like asking a cleaning service to clear out your closet. Only YOU can… make the tough decisions, know your style, try things on to see what fits and let go of what you need to discard!

Have you defined success in your own terms? If so, please comment about:

• how your idea of success has changed
• who previously formed your ideas of success
• your commitment to defining and designing it for yourself.

Then answer the questions that follow to refine or define what success means to you.

Answering the questions isn’t easy but it’s pivotal to long-term happiness and the ability to live with purpose and on purpose. It requires that you stop putting one foot in front of the other  – that you take a step back to observe and reflect. This quote sums it up:

I can teach anybody how to get what they want out of life.

The problem is I can’t find anybody who can tell me what they want.   ~Mark Twain

So…let’s begin proving Mark Twain wrong. Start with a blank sheet of paper and use Webster’s definition #3,“one that succeeds”- begin to define:

What IS success in each of the main categories of life?

1. Family
2. Health
3. Finance
4. Job or Career
5. Personal: spiritual, friendships, hobbies
6. Community, etc.

- Where does the successful you prioritize your time?

- What are you known as, or for, in each category?

- How does the successful you look, walk, think, and talk like in each category?

- How can you integrate those to create some semblance of work-life balance? What do you need to let go?

IF you’re serious about doing the work, you’re on your way to becoming the architect of your job and life.  Start your list and keep it handy for further thought and reflection – maybe transfer it to an index card that you can easily post to consider throughout the day and weeks ahead.  Read part 2 to further explore the implications and definitions of success.

Is There a Formula for Job and Life Succcess?

JobLife Architects want to know… can job achievement and life happiness co-exist a well-adjusted and fulfilled person?

A 72 year-old study provides us with a glimpse into some of the answers.  Harvard researchers began following 268 (male sophomores including John F. Kennedy and Ben Bradlee) who entered Harvard in the late 1930s.  These were men that already “had it made” by most societal standards.  But the study’s goal was not to see how the well-adjusted, affluent and educated would fare, but rather, to see how their lives would play out and what factors really impacted happiness or success over time.  The study was followed these men for 72 years, allowing data to be gathered as the study participants went through life stages beginning with their sophomore year of college and (including for some: war, careers, marriages and divorces, parenthood and grandparenthood, and now for those still alive, old age)  up to death. Here, for the first time, we can learn from one of the most comprehensive longitudinal studies in history, The Grant Study delves deeply into what really matters at the end of each day and at the end of our lives.

David Brooks writes of the study in his Opinion article “They Had It Made” published in “The New York Times” and summarizes:  ” A third of the men would suffer at least one bout of mental illness. Alcoholism would be a running plague. The most mundane personalities often produced the most solid success. One man couldn’t admit to himself that he was gay until he was in his late 70s.   Author Joshua Wolf Shenk was permitted access to the study archives – his findings and thoughts are published in “The Atlantic” in an essay, “What Makes Us Happy?”

The articles beg the questions that only we can answer for ourselves:

At the end of our days and lives we will only have deathbed regrets if we discover that we spent our lives living someone else’s idea of success.

What does success mean to you?

• Is success more about material goods, achievement, happiness or some mix thereof?

What is the cost of living a life unexamined?

• How might taking the time for reflection and self-awareness have benefited the Grant Study participants who seemingly had it all?
  

See “Who is Defining Your Success” Part I to begin to define your own ideas of success.