How Come We Humans are Biased?

Bias has a negative connotation as if we should not have any. But what if there’s an upside? Has it helped to get us where we are? On the other hand, what do you do if a bias (that you are don’t know you have) is interfering with your relationships and your success at solving problems?

You and I are on this earth because our ancestors strategically adapted to changing circumstances in their lives and the surrounding environment in which they lived. They fought ferociously to survive. Along the way, they decided why certain events happened, whether true or not, based on the best available knowledge at the time.

It seems we humans have a natural tendency to create order out of chaos and in so doing attribute a cause to a happening. We are pattern-seekers and as many phenomena do have discernible, deterministic causes, the system we developed and encoded served us well most of the time. When there is not a clear cause we make up a reason anyway and hence little errors of judgment.

The birth of biases!! Our tightly interconnected brain, with no boss, many options and made up of thousands of specialized modules, spurs the biases along. Advances in neuroscience have helped us understand why - what fires together wires together because the architecture of our brains (a complex system like the weather or the Internet) enables the links. Emotions get mixed in. No five-star general is in control. In the absence of no team members or peers with whom to argue, our free-wheeling thoughts about an event (an interpretation) will be checked against what we know, fit in accordingly and put into our memories as connected. Under similar circumstances later, they will be retrieved automatically. Hence non-conscious biases!

Like our ancestors, we are still wrestling with what is real. We constantly update our perceived reality through a mixture of new evidence true or not, and a made-up former narrative that fits in with what we know and with which we feel comfortable. Like our ancestors, we are forced to adapt to current circumstances in order to survive and thrive. Climate change, the weather, new technologies, financial crises, gridlock, joblessness, pandemics and much more threaten our safety and security. The human spirit seldom gives up. We try to figure it out increasingly on a global, local and personal basis. Our brains (the conscious parts) decide. We believe.

Trial and error works more or less because we have to argue our beliefs (positive or negative biases) usually with others in a team or on a larger scale.  We challenge assumptions. We ask for and look for the evidence. We then may take a second look at our points-of-view. Eventually collective intelligence mitigates the errors. The mounting evidence on the reality of climate change is one example.

The culprit behind bias creation is primarily our left hemisphere, according to Daniel Kahneman, Iain McGilchrist, Michael S. Gazzaniga and many others who study and write about how we make decisions. It is the great interpreter. It does not like chaos. It tries to fit everything into a story – events with context. It dislikes and has little faith in randomness. The left hemisphere does not operate in real time but rather in post-hoc- time (explanations and observations) trying to make sense out of scattered “facts”.  A little bit of fudging here and there arises to create a story that makes sense. It is a slow thinking process, but one that is essential to our growing understanding of how the world works and how we can make it a better place for all.

Our left hemisphere, while having a module or more specializing in interpretation, is hindered. The quality of its thinking is only as good as the information it accesses. It engages with the information to sift and sort things out. This is where the right hemisphere comes in.

The right hemisphere lives a literal life in present time like a meditator or a good listener. The right hemisphere works fast because it does not interpret but it does pay attention to things and relationships. Always on. Always observing. It is the ultimate explorer. If we let it. When the left hemisphere strays too far from reality, the “explorer” might rein the “interpreter” in because of what it “knows”.

The two hemispheres are complementary, acting like a smart partnership, of different capabilities, when we humans choose to take advantage of their respective specialties. What helps the partnership along? Here are some practices:

An overriding stretch goal that inspires people to join and contribute

A cause bigger than ourselves around which many can rally despite opposing viewpoints

Tapping into the wisdom of the crowd by allowing all involved to think for themselves before sharing opinions

Equal turn-taking and listening in a team as Alex Pentland from MIT and author of Social Physics has discovered is fundamental to team innovation and productivity

Introducing more fun into the workplace which activates the right hemisphere’s explorer mode and the brain’s depth of knowledge

Creating a positive culture of acceptance and celebration of everyone’s strengths and contributions

Starting with “I don’t know”, the standard self-talk of top notch investigators tackling complex problems with no obvious solutions. 

The bottom line: There’s a reason for our biases. We are evolving.  We are learning. Neuroscientist David Linden describes the evolution of the brain as a progressive accumulation of “kludges” or “quick and dirty fixes” struggling to make sense of who we are and how to deal with our changing social, economic, technological and political environment.

Sometimes the environment is glaringly out-of-step with our capabilities. For example, skunks when faced with a rapidly approaching vehicle have been known to hold their ground, perform a 180 degree manoeuver, lift their tails and spray the oncoming vehicle.

Nevertheless, we are becoming more conscious and collectively smart. But the process is sluggish to give us time to adapt. Skirmishes and set-backs happen. Different places on this earth progress at different speeds. Opposing viewpoints cause us to debate endlessly. Our global connectedness fueled by technology helps us to collaborate quickly and richly to discover creative solutions and make corrections. A little at a time, we are “busting out” of our out-of-date biases in the pursuit of common ground. We are shaping a more progressive, democratic world in which we have the pleasure of ongoing survival.

The Semicolons in Our Lives are Doing Battle with Our Twitter Brains

Evolution has hardwired us to read but there is no genetic map for it. The “expert reading brain” comes into being through parents, teachers and self-study. Its thickly branched and interconnected cells are the result of deep, focused attention and concentration on the pages of a non-networked book or article. According to Nicholas Carr (The Shallows) and a chorus of neuroscientists, hyperlinked reading triages our attention inviting multi-tasking and the potential for a “techno-brain” less able to deal with complexity.


Should we be worried? Yes, because the problems we face are “swampier”. These “semi-colon” situations have no technical recipe upon which we can draw. We have to learn as we go and that requires a deep thinker type of brain and skill.

Our workplaces past and present have never been very friendly to slow, concentrated thinking. Packed agendas and back-to back meetings in a hurry up, make-a-decision-fast atmosphere, most often create too much noise for creative thought. In the not-too-distant past, holidays, evenings and weekends offered some respite for re-charging and reflection. But, now the 24/7 social media tsunami is escalating the battle with our evolutionary need to concentrate to survive. Or is it?

We are evolving as did our ancestors. How we do so might be more the point.

Personally I am a Twitter and blog fan. I find those media stimulating and information-rich. I am learning more because of my interconnections with others. These links are not distracting. They instead spark all kinds of ideas which I record. They lead to research pathways I might never have discovered. Put simply – I have added to not subtracted from my thinking brain.

However, I do follow a structure which helps my “expert reading brain” to stay alive:

1. I seldom click on hyperlinks until I have read the whole article;

2. I take notes highlighting key points and then adding my own thoughts about their meaning for my habits and challenges;

3. If I don’t have time to concentrate when I encounter the new information, I set aside time in the evening or morning – about an hour every day – to review and focus on the ideas flowing through Twitter and other sources;

4. Although I have a Kobo, I plan to mix reading “regular” with e-books. Apparently the hands-on nature of a “real” book, like handwriting, is a more efficient and possibly meaningful route to our brains.

Nicholas Christakis, professor of medicine and sociology at Harvard University, claims that we are in the very early stages of the new biosocial science. It is helping us to understand why we behave for better or worse.

At the heart of the matter is wisdom. Without it, we are only left with information. To quote Confucius:

Wisdom can be learned by reflection, the noblest; imitation, the easiest and experience, the bitterest.

We need all three.

Are You the Salad Bowl or the Salad?

Finally brethren, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is of good repute, if there is excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, let your mind dwell on those things.

---Philippians 4:8

In Daniel Amen, Change Your Brain, Change Your Life

I was introduced to the salad bowl/salad concept many moons ago when immersed in an intense personal growth exploration phase. It goes like this:

When confronted with an issue or a conflict which provokes emotionally-charged views, do you get right in there and fight with the cucumbers and tomatoes or do you take the role of the salad bowl, holding the entire salad in place for the sake of all?

The Tucson, Arizona shooting rampage reminded me of the significant role of any leader and any person in setting and managing the emotional tone of each and every difference of opinion. This is the least we should expect from our political leaders. Better to be the salad bowl with the aim of making everything work than inciting riots among the salad ingredients.

Our deep limbic system, the seat of our emotions, is much older than our rational brain. It generates our first reaction to all that goes on around us. At the same time, it is directly connected to our executive brain, the pre-frontal cortex which helps us with judgment, sifting and sorting information, thinking about our thinking and ultimately with good (or bad) decision-making. But when the deep limbic system is in overdrive, reason goes out the window. We know from our family environments, that one upset leads to another at times spiraling our of control. The opposite is true too. So is the case in an organization or a nation.

Leaders do set the emotional tone. Each of us sets the emotional tone. Will it be rhetoric twisting the truth to bash those with whom we differ?Or, will it be issue-focused, not person-focused, with the aim of finding good solutions to shared, vexxing problems with no obvious solutions?

Dacher Keltner, author of Born to be Good emphasizes that self-interest, competition and vigilance have been built into our evolutionary makeup to survive. But, he explains that these tendencies are only half the story. "Homo reciprocans" is a more apt description of our social nature with emotions as the glue that binds. Emotions trump facts and figures. They are infectious, especially positive ones which open minds up to possibilities. Fear or negativity makes for more closed minds, reducing novel approaches to intractable problems. How does a leader deal with this responsibly to bring about change for the whole, critics and supporters alike? 

The "Jen ratio" is a tool that can help us cultivate being the salad bowl holding the whole rather than being one piece of the salad having no impact or inciting riots with other pieces, so to speak. "Jen" means "humane". The numerator (the salad bowl) refers to acts of kindness, compassion, awe, love and gratitude. It implies, "I am responsible" for the process and the results. The denominator (the salad) embodies the "bad" action when establishing one's character in relation to others. Such a person, who is "in the salad" is disdainful, critical, condescending and contemptuous. Each of us can track our "Jen ratio" and make improvements consciously.

So can leaders of nations. Keltner further explains in his book that "nations whose citizens bring out the good in others thrive because it generates trust". Trust facilitates "economic exchange with fewer transaction costs, adversarial settlements, discrimination and economic inequality."

Americans are united in grief now over the attack on Congressman Gabrielle Giffords and many other innocent people. But they are not united in responsibility. Time will tell. If politicians and pundits alike can choose the salad bowl as a stance for action, rather than the salad only and a positive Jen ratio as a continuous goal, always in need of calibration, issue by issue, conversation by conversation, the emotional tone in America might shift for the betterment of all.

A Prodigy's Mid-Life Crisis: The Tiger Effect Re-Visited

Imagine growing up as a child prodigy where everyone “Oohs and awes” around you? Then, unlike many child prodigies, you grow up and become one as an adult. Through your eyes you look out into the world and what do you see? Lesser mortals? Fawning adults? Beautiful women falling all over you? Fearful competitors? The next mountain to climb? I can do it better?

Whatever you see, that’s what you believe whether it’s true or not. Then, you shape and conduct your life accordingly. While “can-do” optimism in principle is good, it can be downright dangerous if you have not walked over hot coals like most mere mortals along the way. With the ability to recognize red flags underdeveloped and a big well of confidence over-riding danger zones, you risk falling into traps.

And into a trap Tiger Woods fell. Somewhere along the line, Tiger made certain decisions that have come back to haunt him. He has no roadmap for dealing with significant personal failure. Failure has never been an option as he has until his fateful middle of the night car accident controlled the avoidance of it superbly. But, this time, with his father who was his guidepost gone, Tiger lost his bearings. Opportunity to repair the damage lurks but it’s going to be Tiger’s most difficult “tournament”.

We have seen this often in business: Martha Stewart, Conrad Black, the Enron, Eatons and Nortel folks, the 2008 financial melt-down and so on. Adult-onset prodigy development can be more dangerous than in childhood. Especially if wealth and power are added to the mix.

We mere mortals are subject to this too. Our judgment can become skewed if we are not on the alert to challenge our assumptions, debate and discuss them with others and send out some trial balloons. That’s the value of real team work in this all too complex society in which we live.

Much has been written about the challenge of good judgment and strategic decision-making of late. For example, Michael Roberto in Why Great Leaders Don’t Take Yes for an Answer asserts that “differences in mental horsepower seldom distinguish success from failure” in smart decision-making amidst complexity. Adding to the “why” of this conundrum, Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton in Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths and Total Nonsense conclude that managers routinely ignore or reject solid evidence” that “damage careers and companies over and over again”. Our brains, that is, our minds, are both friends and foes.

Where was Tiger’s team? Who challenged his judgment? Some likely did. It appears from the current fall-out that Tiger paid little heed. Child prodigies are according to the literature “extreme specialists” who are finely attuned to a particular field of knowledge and who demonstrate “effortless mastery”. The caveat is that such mastery is not demonstrated “across the board”. Aye, here’s the rub for Tiger. What a shock for him and his entire ecosystem.

This is a character challenge for Tiger and for those who support him. Character, according to Manfred Kets de Vries in The Leader on the Couch, is the “sum of deeply ingrained patterns of behaviour that define an individual” from the Greek word meaning “engraving”. How will Tiger re-engrave all that goes into shaping his behaviour? What behaviours (driven by values) will his supporters from the “Tiger they knew before the downfall” use to either help Tiger or set him loose to fend for himself?

The way ahead like so much of life these days is not clear. In the months ahead, we will either be inspired or dismayed by Tiger’s and others’ actions.

As the Accenture ad featuring Tiger intoned, “It’s what you do next that counts”.

Canadian Consular Officials in Kenya Low on Aristotle's Practical Wisdom

Now my retired mother is becoming extremely wary of travelling. She travelled all over the world with my father on business. But airplane crashes, VIA rail strikes and breakdowns, an ever-thickening U.S. border and no guarantee of protection from adversity by Canadian consular officials have dimmed her enthusiasm.

The apparent lack of good judgment by the Canadian consular officials in Kenya with respect to Suaad Hagi Mohamud’s plight sends shivers up our collective ordinary citizen spines (that’s most of us). The confidence that we will be protected from unfounded accusations as to our identity when travelling abroad has been dealt yet another huge blow, as many cases have preceded Hagi Mohamud’s.

Given what we know of the case, the most mysterious is the way in which decisions were made. They seem almost laughable in that the starting point was the Kenyan customs officials determining that Hagi Mohamud’s lips did not match those on her passport. After that the process went from bad to worse.

What was going on? Were Canadian consular officials spooked by some current terrorist threat and inadvertently transposed that to Hagi even when she produced every imaginable form of seemingly valid identification? Or, were they so rule bound that they lacked the ability to make a good decision? Is it possible that in the absence of this learned skill, they were tricked by their brains into making “bad” decisions and as a consequence created a truly farcical situation right up the line to the Prime Minister?

Aristotle would argue that in the face of what we know, all involved who had the authority to shape a good decision lacked “practical wisdom”—a master virtue that guides the application of the right amount and mix of their leadership virtues to a context specific situation. He called this a person’s “executive decision maker” necessary for stopping our range of virtues from “running amuck” and enabling us “to do the right thing in the right way at the right time”.

Practical wisdom evolves from experience and works best in an environment in which people are expected to use their good sense not just the rules. To be wise in the face of non-routine situations requires practice. A rigid bureaucracy does not allow wisdom to improve. Quite the contrary, it gets worse. This may be the real root cause of the problem.