Unconscious Bias & The Everyday Cost of Unexamined Thoughts
Its 12th December 2019. It’s a big day. Not because its Frank Sinatra’s birthday, nor Bill Nighy’s nor Will Carling’s (although all are true!). Nor is it significant because of its commemoration of the devastating Clapham Junction rail crash in 1988 or Kenya’s independence from the UK. Its significance lies in the fact that it’s a big decision day. Every day is of course, but today is special. You’ve committed to make a final decision on the new job you’ve been offered and on the back of that, you’ve an estate agent waiting for your decision on a larger flat which is hanging in the balance. It feels right, but it is a huge amount of money. At work you’ve a tricky conference call mid-morning, a team get-together at lunchtime and a performance review with a team member in the afternoon. A regular day! After voting (today is General Election day in case I forgot to mention that), you’ve a gym induction to do. That’s it! Feel familiar?
A day beset with decisions. A day beset with decision risks. The pace of modern life - a lot to do, a lot to process. Arguably too much to process, at least too much to fully process effectively. Thankfully we have our mental shortcuts, or heuristics, to help us out, ones that we are not even aware of. Shortcuts which help us rapidly assimilate data, make speedy decisions, function on auto-pilot and get through the pressures of modern life.
But…there’s a but which is that these very shortcuts, these unexamined thoughts, are the very mechanisms by which unintended biased thoughts and actions creep into our everyday behaviour. It is these thoughts and deeds which can’t be legislated against or ‘policed’ easily. In everyday terms, it’s these unexamined, fast-paced thoughts which lead to bias impacting on decisions.
If we accept the phrase ‘unconscious bias’, it is easier to accept that it is what it is and that there’s little hope of change; it all happens via mysterious, inaccessible processes. In reality it’s more accurate and empowering to call it ‘automatic bias’. For every automatic process, and consequently automatic bias, there’s a manual over-ride. The manual over-ride here is slowed down thinking – that is, examined thoughts….
If we take a relatively random handful of recognised heuristics we can start to see how they influence our everyday lives…
Regression to the mean: over multiple measurements, whilst the observations will go up and down, eventually they’ll average out…. at the mean. In a work setting, if we are broadly capable at our work, our work will settle on its own average performance level. It will get better in the iterations after a poor performance patch, just as there’ll be an apparent dip in performance following a period of high performance. This will happen irrespective of any other intervention. Giving you harsh feedback following poor performance or praise after the success will not change what happens next. If you happened to have noticed a lift in performance after criticising and team member this could leave you with the short-cut heuristic belief that ‘criticism works’, or conversely, ‘praise doesn’t’! As a result, in your busy day, you rush from your team lunch into your performance review thinking that criticism is what will lift performance… and so you criticise liberally… and make a biased (bad) judgement that is unlikely to have a long-term effect on the team members performance.
Imaginability: the more readily we can imagine a scenario happening and the more vivid the related (imagined) risks, the more likely we are to over-estimate the likelihood of the scenario happening. We confuse imaginability with likelihood. That new flat is an incredible space and imagining the prospect of not living there seems like too big an opportunity to miss. You remember the estate agent telling you that it would go quickly (so adding in a bit of implied scarcity) – you send them a message saying you’ll take the flat. You haven’t yet committed to the new job, but the fear of losing the flat was unimaginable! Actually, there are lots of flats constantly coming and going on the market and this one had been on the market for a little while. Imagining the worst, not the likelihood, biased your decision.
Emotion trumps ‘facts’: A single, impactful emotional counter data point can and does skew our judgement. At lunchtime you have a conversation with a friend who used to work with someone who went to school with the candidate you were going to vote for – “They were a bully and arrogant” - and so despite all your manifesto reading, your tactical voting website reviews, your voting track record, your vote, when you get to the polling station 5 minutes before it closes, goes to another candidate. One emotional counter data point changed everything.
We need to learn to recognise these short-cuts and catch ourselves in those situations where we do have more time to slow things down, examine our though-processes and bring a bit more conscious care to our judgements. . Set in the context of automatic biases, this becomes an essential step in making the unconscious more conscious Read our long article to find out more about these biases and actions we can take.
