Everyday Bias. Howard J. Ross
often find people intending to make sincere compliments that can be quite off-putting, like “When I first met you I was surprised to see that you were handicapped, but now I don’t even think about you being a person with special needs.” I would much prefer “person with a disability,” which doesn’t identify me as my disability. Others say things such as, “You must work for a really special company if they would hire someone like you in such a visible role.” Some people continue to ask when I will be getting well enough to walk again, rather than be in my wheelchair.
Most people with disabilities consider their disability to be an important and valued aspect of their identity that does not need to be overlooked or forgotten in order to make us more acceptable and competent.
I remember leading a workshop for a client many years ago in St. Louis. We were conducting a three-day training in a hotel and had arranged to have several wheelchairs available for the participants to use at various times as they negotiated the hotel. Obviously we were not pretending that this was the same as having a permanent disability, but we found that it could make a great impact upon people to consciously see what it was like to negotiate both the physical environment and being with people. One of the participants took the wheelchair overnight, and called for room service for breakfast in the morning. The participant reported that when the room service waiter came with the food in the morning, he seemed visibly surprised to find somebody with a wheelchair in a room that was not handicap accessible. He proceeded to place the tray on the table, remove the chrome food cover, and started to cut the participant’s food! The participant was stunned and asked the waiter what he was doing. The waiter said he was only trying to be of help. This example shows how we can feel very warmly toward people and still demonstrate behavior that is patronizing and demonstrates a judgment of less competence.
On the other hand, you may have enormous respect for someone’s competence, thinking them extremely capable, and yet just not like them very much. This may result in a completely different kind of bias. You may not choose them to be on a team you are putting together to work on a project, or not invite them to lunches or other business gatherings, and in doing so affect their ability to be successful.
How Rational Are We?
These findings also are important to consider as we think about our true orientation toward people versus the orientation that, especially in business environments, we sometimes believe we take. We like to think we are rational, and that our emotions are secondary. This is not unusual in Western cultures. We have a long history of valuing the rational over the emotional. But really, how rational are we?
In the age of bifurcated media and social media streams that let us select who and what we are exposed to, it is obvious that politic differences create different “realities” in our experience of what is going on in the world around us. But Yale University law professor Daniel Kahan, along with psychologists Ellen Peters from Ohio State University, Erica Dawson from Cornell University, and Paul Slovic from the University of Oregon, decided to explore whether, for example, our politics might affect our ability to do something we consider very “rational” indeed: math problems.[16] Kahan gave more than one thousand participants in his study a tricky math problem to compute. In the first version, the question he posed involved the results of a clinical study of skin cream. Fifty-nine percent of the participants got the problem wrong.
Then he decided to add a more emotional component. He took the same numbers and framed them as a question about the effectiveness of laws against concealed handguns, a highly political and emotional issue. He and his colleagues found that “conservative Republicans were much less likely to correctly interpret data suggesting that a gun ban decreased crime in a city; for liberal Democrats, the exact opposite was true. The people who were normally best at mathematical reasoning, moreover, were the most susceptible to getting the politically charged question wrong.”[17]
We are trained to think we can talk people out of their points of view if we give them the right “evidence.” But what this study demonstrated was that political biases actually distort our ability to reason logically. In the battle between emotion and rationality, emotion usually wins!
In a similar study, Brendan Nyhan, assistant professor of government at Dartmouth College, found that when voters are misinformed, factual information only makes them become more rigid in their point of view! Nyhan found these instances of facts making people more rigid:
People who thought weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq believed that misinformation even more strongly when they were shown a news story correcting that belief.
People who thought George W. Bush banned all stem cell research kept thinking he did that even after they were shown an article saying that only some federally funded stem cell work was stopped.
People who said the economy was the most important issue to them, and who disapproved of Barack Obama’s economic record, were shown a graph of nonfarm employment over the prior year. It included a rising line that indicated about one million jobs were added. They were asked whether the number of people with jobs had gone up, down, or stayed about the same. Many, looking straight at the graph, said down.[18]
All of this might suggest that the age-old adage is true: “Never let the facts get in the way of a good story!”
A source of much of this thinking goes back almost twenty-five centuries to Plato. In one of his dialogues, the Phaedrus, Plato explained the way humans experienced the world through an allegory of a chariot. Describing love as “divine madness,” Plato describes the charioteer driving a chariot pulled by two winged horses:
First the charioteer of the human soul drives a pair, and secondly one of the horses is noble and of noble breed, but the other quite the opposite in breed and character. Therefore, in our case the driving is necessarily difficult and troublesome.
In this allegory, the charioteer represents our rational intellect, the part of our soul that must keep the horses, our passionate nature and our righteousness (extreme positive emotions), and our more lustful negative emotions in check. It is only when the charioteer is “in charge” that we can move forward toward enlightenment.
For 2,500 years, we have worshipped at the altar of the rational. Think about how embedded it is in our language. “Are you sure you’re being rational about that? Aren’t you being too emotional?”
It turns out that we are far less “rational” then we are “rationalizing,” and the lack of awareness of that may get in the way of our ability to think as clearly as we might. The renowned neuroscientist, Antonio Damasio, discussed this in his book Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain.
In the book, Damasio described his encounter with a patient he called “Elliott.” Elliott had a brain tumor removed that had caused ventromedial frontal lobe damage. The ventromedial prefrontal cortex is the part of the prefrontal cortex that processes risk and fear. It plays a major role in managing our emotional responses and decision making. Elliott, who had been a successful businessman and family man, was struggling. Despite the fact that he still registered very high intelligence (his IQ was in the ninety-seventh percentile), everything around him, his businesses, and his marriage, were failing. One would think that somebody without the pull of emotions would make very “rational” decisions. However, Elliott seemed to lack any motivation at all. Damasio wrote that “he was always controlled. Nowhere was there a sense of his own suffering, even though he was the protagonist. I never saw a tinge of emotion in my many hours of conversation with him: no sadness, no impatience, no frustration.”
Damasio found that without access to his emotions, Elliott was incapable of making even the simplest of decisions. Each small decision seemed to take him forever. He took long periods of time to choose what to write with, whether or not to make an appointment, or decide where to eat lunch. He concluded that “Elliott emerged as a man with a normal intellect who was unable to decide properly, especially when the decision involved personal or social matters.”
Damasio described Elliott as an “uninvolved spectator” in his own life.