When does bias beat reason?

If we think back to our direct ancestors a few thousand years ago, each of them only survived by having really quick reactions. When hearing a strange noise nearby in those woods, anyone who thought, “Gee, I wonder what that could be?” did not live long enough to pass on their genes. Our brain is still filled with numerous techniques for making fast decisions, flight or flight is just the most obvious. At a course I was on recently, the speaker claimed that when we meet someone new, we form our first impressions in 0.07 seconds, by 0.10 seconds we have passed judgement and by the end of the first second we have reached conclusions. She was talking about a fairly deep part of the brain – now able to be measured with scanning equipment – and not something most of us are even conscious of. And so it is with the vast majority of our brain’s activity:  we are simply not aware of what our brain is deciding, despite believing our conscious, rational mind is (mostly) in control.

If you doubt this, or think it is exaggerated, thinking about optical illusions might help. Our brains are (almost) all wired the same way, with a short cut which generally makes perfect sense of straight lines and squares. Except not in this particular arrangement, so we can’t keep all these lines straight all the time, no matter how fiercely we tell our rational mind to make it so.

Thinking illusions are no different – “bias” is just our label for the same sort of hard wired short cut, but this time in our thinking. One I struggle with myself is “confirmation bias”; this is where I am very good at finding and remembering anything which supports my own theory about something, and even better at ignoring anything that might contradict it. As with all biases, we see them in others with the greatest of ease, while generally being blind to our own.

Christmas is a time when this all comes to a head, when we get to hang out with family members who consciously or unconsciously press some buttons, triggering our biases. Here is a link[1] to some great cartoons of the most common ones. So what can we do? You know the answer: take a deep breath, engage the “observer self” and remember, YOU are not your biases!. Have a great holiday break. 

[1] https://medium.com/@Angy_Stallone/the-most-common-cognitive-biases-9499bbbf97c7

or if you have to type it

https://tinyurl.com/yaof4tub

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