Let’s begin with a short bias quiz:
- What day comes after Saturday?
- What is the first month of the year?
- How many fingers do you have on one hand?
- Name a vegetable.
If, like most people, your answer to question four was “carrot,” then behold the power of our biases—our automatic judgments—to lock in on a truth without even thinking.
The concept of bias has been a trending topic in recent years, as individuals and organizations alike have turned their attention to the impact that cognitive biases can have on their thinking and decision making. And this investigation is particularly useful for an institution as complex as the legislature, where our individual and collective biases shape our policies and procedures in often unseen ways.
Academics define bias as a “disproportionate weight in favor of (or against) an idea or thing, especially one that is preconceived or unreasoned.” So bias is a predisposition toward a particular truth or belief, like an invisible thumb that tilts a scale in one direction. But it’s also important to note what bias is not. It’s a tendency, yes, but it isn’t a certainty. Our biases may cause us to lean in one direction, but that incline can be reversed. So while you may have a bias toward action films, that doesn’t mean you can’t sit sobbing through the ending of Marley and Me. It’s a tendency, not a life sentence.
But why do we even have biases in the first place? A better question might be: why do we NEED biases? Because biases are a feature, not a bug, of our brains. They are there by design, not by accident. And here’s why: our brains process 11 million bits of information each second, but we are only consciously aware of 40 bits at any given time. To help us sift through that much unconscious information, our brains look for shortcuts, and the easiest shortcut is to sort information into categories: this is good, this is bad; this is safe, this is unsafe. Imagine primitive man hearing a rustle in the tall grass. By the time all the possibilities were processed—maybe it’s a bird; maybe it’s the wind; maybe it’s a rodent—a lion would have had a nice snack. So biases are the tools that allow our brain to reduce its cognitive load so that we can make quick decisions. And when you place that idea into a legislative setting, we can see the benefits of our biases. There is simply not enough time to process all the issues, facts, data, perspectives and personalities that constantly bombard us. So we lean on our biases to quickly make sense of things in order to make decisions in a timely manner. The problem is when we simplify our cognitive load so much that we eliminate real thinking altogether.
So what can be done to stop that dynamic from happening? How can we escape from our bias bubble—even for a short while—to reengage the kind of thinking necessary to find solutions to the problems that plaque our communities? Let’s examine two techniques that put the thinking back into our decision-making process:
- Employ Red Teaming. This practice originated in the military, becoming popular in recent years with IT professionals seeking to defend their systems from hackers. Red Teaming is the practice of rigorously challenging our assumptions by adopting an adversarial perspective. Red Teaming forces us to step into the brain of someone who has a radically different view of the playing field than we do—different values, assumptions, and objectives—and to think like them as we assess our plans. It’s like an offensive coordinator of a football team inviting the defensive coordinator to review their plays before the action starts. They simply see the game differently, and because of that can point out the flaws in our design.
- Perform a Premortem. We’re all familiar with the practice of a postmortem—examining a recently deceased individual and assessing the cause of death after the fact. But a premortem is a mental exercise that imagines that our plan has already failed before it even begins, requiring us to work backward to determine why it failed. So instead of asking “what might go wrong” before we begin an initiative, we ask instead “what did go wrong,” and correct that error before we take the first step forward. Performing a premortem requires us to think our way through a failure to find the root cause, and to apply the results of that thinking before we even begin our project.
Remember the definition of bias: opinions that are preconceived or unreasoned. Biases are unthinking truths, and both of these exercises require that missing component: they force us to think. So while biases are necessary to help us sift through the vast amount of information that bombards us every second, they carry a distinct risk in a complex setting like the legislature. We came into this profession to improve the lives of our constituents, to make progress in areas that will truly help people. But as the Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw reminds us: “progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.” Bias is the cementing of our thoughts, not the opening of our minds; it is fundamentally static, never dynamic. Bias is the unthinking mind, personified. So if you really want to defeat them, if you truly want to escape from your bias bubble, all you really need to do is… think.