Everyday Bias. Howard J. Ross
organize around particular ideas, concepts, or variables that are important to, or known by us.
The same is true at work. Our professional skills focus our attention in similar ways. I remember a number of years ago I had a visit from my wife’s brother, who has a very successful house painting business. I was telling him we were thinking of painting one of the rooms in the house and asked him a simple question. His response involved many more questions, questions I would never have thought to ask. What kind of paint? What kind of roller? To which I responded, “A paint roller!” Then there was the matter of how long to let the paint dry. How many coats? On and on. Knowing what questions to ask is often what actually gives us mastery. And that same body of distinctions can frame what we see or miss, and in doing so, can dramatically affect the nature of the way we see the world.
The more critical we perceive something to be part of our survival, the more we will automatically refer back to the instinctive ways of seeing that we have learned. My friend and colleague John Cruzat spent twenty years in the military, with most of those years spent in hostile environments. He can’t help but scan rooftops, even as he walks down a perfectly safe street, because his war experience trained him to do that, even though it makes no real sense in the situation and environment he is in at present.
Still, when we are looking at those things that help shape our experiences and perceptions, what things are we not seeing?
If the job that we have can so easily shape our perception, how can the most fundamental identities that we live with throughout our lives, including our race, gender, sexual orientation, age, and so on, not do as much?
In real time, being able to make quick determinations about the people we encounter and the situations we are in is critical to our survival. It is built into the fundamental ways our brains function. Social identification is especially important because picking up social clues about the circumstances we are in not only helps us be successful, but more importantly, it keeps us safe.
However, in real life, what we think we see may not be clearly happening at all. Our perceptions, our memories and our social judgments are all constructed by our unconscious mind from the limited information that we interpret through the expectations we have, the context that we see the situation in, and what we hope to get out of the situation.
So, what really takes place in our minds when we observe a person or situation?
Often, our first mental reaction comes from the amygdala, the most primitive part of the brain, and, when looking at matters from an evolutionary standpoint, the oldest part. There are two amygdalae in a normal human brain, each located within the temporal lobes. The amygdalae are a key part of our limbic system, which is a complex set of structures in the brain that control various important functions including emotion, long-term memory, and behavior. The amygdalae play a primary role in processing our emotional reactions, and they also are involved in beginning the process of linking those emotional reactions to memories.
Quite logically, the amygdala is especially sensitive to fear. I often like to think of the amygdala as a deer in the forest. If you have ever observed a deer in the wild, you notice that it is constantly scanning, highly sensitive to potential danger, and ready to respond accordingly. The amygdala has evolved in similar ways. As I noted earlier, from a survival standpoint alone, it makes sense for the amygdala to spot danger before pleasure. If something pleasurable is coming your way and you don’t notice it, it is a nice surprise. Certainly no major harm is done. But if something dangerous is approaching and you don’t notice it, you could end up dead! Something of that sort has a tendency to heighten the senses, doesn’t it? The amygdala scans what we are seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, or sensing with a particular sensitivity to circumstances or people that might be threatening. Some of these might be obvious to us, but overwhelmingly, they may be things that our conscious mind does not even perceive.
We are exposed to as many as eleven million sensory triggers at any one time, yet we can only absorb about forty to fifty. We consciously notice a much smaller number than that, perhaps as few as seven. Given the immense number of stimuli we are exposed to at any one particular moment, how can we really know what we are responding to?
As the amygdala picks up these signals, it sends them to the hippocampus, the center of long term memory in the brain, as if running to the filing cabinet to see if you can find something that you know you have stored somewhere in there. The memory guides our reaction, in a conscious or unconscious, and positive or negative way. That triggers the anterior cingulate cortex. The anterior cingulate cortex is responsible for a tremendous amount of our rapid, responsive, and automatic functioning. This amygdala and anterior cingulate cortex response is fundamental to the functioning of the limbic system. It keeps us walking, talking, breathing, along with hundreds of other “automatic” responses that would almost paralyze us if we had to think about them each time we encountered a new environmental stimuli. It is like a raging river of automaticity that helps us function on a minute-by-minute basis throughout our lives. Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman called this System One thinking. It is very instinctive, very fast, and often strongly driven by visceral, emotional responses.
This automatic response rapidly kicks our brain into reaction to whatever the amygdala senses. These almost instantaneous reactions are often drawn from past memories, and they provide us with the ability to respond and react quickly when necessary. For example, if somebody throws something at you, it is not the best time to stop and say, “Hmmm. What is the best thing for me to do in a situation like this?” If you do, the object could hit you. Instead, the anterior cingulate cortex sends a message to our nervous system that causes us to react to the potential threat and our hands fly up to protect ourselves, or we duck or dodge the object. Most people can probably remember the game of “flinch” that many of us played as children, in which one person would place their hands under another’s and then either try to slap the other person’s hands or pretend to do so. Remember how hard it was to stop the automatic impulse to pull one’s hands away?
Our reaction to what we see is also strongly affected by the context in which we see it. Let me give you an example. Read the characters in figure 2.3:
Now read the characters in figure 2.4 on the next page.
So, is the middle character a “B” or a “13”? Context determines whether it is a letter or a number. In fact, context determines almost everything we see.
Where bias is concerned, we usually see people in the context of the ideas we have developed about “those kinds of people.” One of the responses in this cycle that is especially central to our propensity toward bias is our natural human tendency to sort people into “them” and “us” categories. This tendency has been documented for many years as the source of some of our most intense conflicts, whether it is in interpersonal relationships based on identity (gender, race, sexual orientation, etc.), or within countries (the North and the South in the American Civil War, Hutu versus Tutsi in Rwanda, Catholic versus Protestant in Northern Ireland, etc.), by politics (Democrat versus Republican), by sports (Yankees/Red Sox or Michigan/Ohio State), and in countless other ways.
Our identities can easily become defined by our relationship with “the other,” and our sensitivity to the feeling of “otherness” can change, depending upon the context we find ourselves in. An African American female attorney, working in a large law firm, may at one moment see herself as one of the lawyers when an issue arrives between the lawyers and the administrative staff, but then just as quickly react from her gender and racial identity when the dispute is between a white male lawyer and a black female executive assistant. We all have multiple identities through which we see the world at various different times, in various different ways.
Allyson Robinson, American Human Rights Activist
I encounter bias on an almost daily basis. To the degree that people around me are aware that I am transgender, I am judged to be mentally unstable,