Everyday Bias. Howard J. Ross
We live with this inherent dichotomy between the rational decisions we think we are supposed to be making, and the real impact of our unconscious processing and our emotional reactions, which can remain under the surface, unobserved and, often, discounted. We want to think of ourselves as good people, but we still have these emotional impulses. This can create an enormous dissonance between what we think we see and evaluate and what’s actually going on. In Freudian terms, the id, our instinctive impulses, react and feel one way, but our superego, our inner controller and manager, tries to keep them under control by burying them deep in our unconscious. We know, for example, that we are “not supposed to be biased,” and so we convince ourselves that we are not, even sometimes in the face of evidence to the contrary.
In fact, one of the many remarkable contradictions we see in this research is that intelligent people with high self-esteem may be the most likely to develop blind spots about their biases. Philip Dodgson and Joanne Wood, both psychologists at the University of Waterloo, found that people with high self-esteem respond less to weaknesses than people with low self-esteem. As a result they may be less likely to internalize negative thoughts or ideas about themselves. Not only that, but intelligent people often can rationalize their own bias as justified. The more sophisticated we are in coming up with explanations for our opinions, the more we see them as truth![20]
In addition, the cultures we grow up in give us a particular set of standards and rules to live by, which inherently are defined by “not like them!” guidelines. Our standards become the foundation of our inner “book of rules,” and others appear to us as simply wrong. Because our identities are formed around this ego identification, we see ourselves as “right” and the “other” as “wrong” or “flawed” in some way.
There is nothing wrong with this process. It is inherent in every human being, but it creates real mischief for us in understanding how we are responding to others because we are largely unaware of it. Let’s now look at how the brain seems to make all of this happen.
1.
Donald A. Redelmeier and Simon D. Baxter, “Rainy Weather and Medical School Admission Interviews,” Canadian Medical Association Journal 181, no. 12 (December 8, 2009): 933.
2.
Jeffrey M. Jones, “Same-Sex Marriage Support Solidifies above 50 Percent in U.S.,” Gallup Politics, May 13, 2013.
3.
Dave McNary, “Over One-third of Respondents Report ‘Disrespectful’ Treatment,” Variety, September 27, 2013.
4.
FreeDictionary.com: http://www.thefreedictionary.com/bias.
5.
Joseph LeDoux, The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998).
6.
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Graham_Sumner.
7.
Brett Pelham and Hart Blanton, Conducting Research in Psychology: Measuring the Weight of Smoke (Independence, KY: Cengage Learning, 2012).
8.
Daniel Casasanto and Kyle Jasmin, “Good and Bad in the Hands of Politicians: Spontaneous Gestures during Positive and Negative Speech,” PLoS ONE 5(7): e11805. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0011805 (2010), http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2F
journal.pone.0011805.
9.
David Brown, “Motor Vehicle Crashes: A Little-Known Risk to Returning Veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan,” Washington Post, May 5, 2013.
10.
Amy J. C. Cuddy, Susan T. Fiske, and Peter Glick, “Warmth and Competence as Universal Dimensions of Social Perception: The Stereotype Content Model and the BIAS Map,” Advances in Experimental Social Psychology 40 (2008): 61–149.
11.
Cuddy, Fiske, Glick, “Warmth and Competence as Universal Dimensions,” 65.
12.
Cuddy, Fiske, Glick, “Warmth and Competence as Universal Dimensions,” 65.
13.
Cuddy, Fiske, Glick, “Warmth and Competence as Universal Dimensions,” 71.
14.
Cuddy, Fiske, Glick, “Warmth and Competence as Universal Dimensions,” 72.
15.
Cuddy, Fiske, Glick, “Warmth and Competence as Universal Dimensions,” 73.
16.
Dan M. Kahan, Ellen Peters, Erica Cantrell Dawson, et al., “Motivated Numeracy and Enlightened Self-Government,” Social Science Research Network, September 3, 2013.
17.
Lindsay Abrams, “Study Proves That Politics and Math Are Incompatible,” Salon, September 5, 2013, http://www.salon.com/2013/09/05/study_proves_that_politics_and _math_are_incompatible/ (emphasis added).
Marty Kaplan, “Scientists’ Depressing New Discovery about the Brain,” Salon, September 17, 2013, http://www.salon.com/2013/09/17/the_most_depressing_discovery_about_the _brain_ever_partner/.
19.
Antonio Damasio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1994).
20.
Philip G. Dodgson and Joanne V. Wood, “Self-esteem and the Cognitive Accessibility of Strengths and Weaknesses after Failure,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 75, no. 1 (July 1998): 178–97.
Chapter 2
Thinking about Thinking
I’m entirely interested in people, and also other creatures and beings, but especially in people, and I tend to read them by emotional field more than anything. So I have a special interest in what they’re thinking and who they are and who’s hiding behind those eyes and how did he get there, and what’s the story, really? —Alice Walker
Imagine you are walking down the street one morning, perhaps going to work. You walk past any number of people. And even though you are mostly lost in thought, certain people get your attention. The guy in the blue suit with the umbrella looks angry. The woman with the wire-rimmed glasses looks friendly. This person looks wealthy, another one poor. This person looks intelligent, that one, you’re not so sure. Or perhaps you walk into a party alone. Who do you walk up to talk to, and why?
Check it out yourself the next time you are in a group of people. How long does it take before you start evaluating, judging, and classifying them as happy, sad, smart, dumb, attractive, unattractive, safe, dangerous? Do you make a quick judgment about their job? And how thoughtful are you when making these judgments? Our minds are filled with memories, conscious and unconscious, that we access to figure out the circumstances we find ourselves in.
In fact, this sort of thinking doesn’t apply only to people, but to virtually anything we encounter. Stop for a moment and take a look around the room or place you are sitting in right now. Allow your eyes to focus on any inanimate object and see what memory comes up. Does the lamp remind you of one that was at your grandmother’s house when you were growing up? Does the fire alarm remind you of fire drills in school? Does a picture on the wall remind you of one that was in a college dorm room? When was the last time you thought about any of those things? As it is, these memories are stored in our unconscious. We are not thinking about them at all until something, or someone, jogs them into consciousness.
And there is