The Rage of Bias and the Hard Work to Tame It

What does it take to be a great leader?

I have been fascinated with this question since my teen years. But, I had no clue about the origins of greatness and how one becomes “great”.  I knew intuitively though that some people well-known and unsung rose above the fray to lend morale support and guidance during good times and bad times. How come?

During the start of my career as a clinical dietitian and public health nutritionist, the mystery deepened because I could not understand why some people enthusiastically and diligently scooped up my expert advice on lifestyle change, but most did not. Was there a connection to my enduring question about greatness? This time though it was about me. My efforts were hit and miss. My quest became more serious. The “eye of the beholder” mystery deepened.

Warmth Matters as a Start

An experience in one of my leadership development classes illustrates our collective struggle at recognizing greatness. The task was to rate various leaders on “warmth” and “competence”. Across most cultures, but not all, we are drawn to “warm” leaders, like a moth attracted to light. Such leaders connect well with people, we intuitively trust them. “Competence” stills matters such as appropriate expertise, follow through and getting things done. According to Harvard’s Amy Cuddy and others, warmth is the “conduit of influence”.

As I passed one group wrestling with Justin Trudeau’s warmth level, a female millennial made a face and exclaimed, “I can’t stand Justin Trudeau”! She could give me no reason. That’s how she felt, full stop. This was a visceral response that surprised me as her classmates overall gave Mr. Trudeau a seven to eight out of 10 for warmth. On competence, Prime Minister Trudeau faired less favourably because his track record is still in the making. But, not surprisingly, she and her group, as well as the class as a whole, gave Nelson Mandela top marks for warmth and competence. Was it because we know more about Mandela, his struggles and eventual redemption - the whole story?

Warmth and Competence Matter in the Long-Run

Stories are still in the making during the marathon race for becoming the next president of the United States. The debate around the world is palpable. Hillary Clinton, despite her considerable track record of achievement (competence), elicits vitriolic loathing among a sizeable portion of Americans, many with legitimate concerns about their well-being opportunities. Her likeability level (warmth) is more or less tied with Donald Trump’s – both low. Why? Well, “she’s cold”, “can’t trust her” and so on.  When asked to explain, people’s voices trail off or they name the recent email scandal or some other situation about which she was investigated for the nth time in her lengthy career. 

For many, the jury’s out on Trump too, particularly his competence. His extreme views on how to govern a liberal democracy and his tendency to be self-aggrandizing are concerning in a world where collaboration more than ever before is required. Throughout history great discoveries and innovations have almost always resulted from a process of working together. Winning wars too depends on a network of partnerships. “Liking” each other” is not always possible. The shared goal though is what matters.

Bias Can Mess Us Up or Grow Leadership Greatness

What’s going on?  It’s complicated. It’s always in the eye of the beholder. Many factors come into play, typically below our awareness:

It’s a social, it’s about survival – when we view another as “warm”, that can mean he or she cares about us, has our back, pays attention to the issues that are holding us back, will keep us safe, make our lives better. Trump seems to be hitting that note with his supporters. But so is Hillary among hers. The lines are blurred here. The truth is elusive.

It’s tribal like in-group/out-group – we effortlessly relate to people like us. It is harder to embrace and include someone we don’t know, who is different, who challenges our beliefs, what we think we know. That elicits fear for our well-being and can be an affront to our identity. 

It’s linked to family upbringing – political ideology, and the values it espouses, is strongly influenced by our parents, grandparents, teachers, and where we grew up.  

It’s an automatic emotional response – instead of treating ourselves as ongoing growing experiments, we default to just “believing” what we think and “know”. A person, data or a situation generates a response, negative or positive, outside the context of critical thinking. We made a decision a long time ago about these and they have been encoded in our minds as reaction recipes. While many of these recipes help us navigate life on a daily basis, thus are helpful and good, with the changing world, others are in need of scrutiny. Not all of us embrace the rigor of challenging what we know as do, for example, scientists and others undertaking research.

Openness Can Tame Blind Bias

Then, how do we square reality a bit better instead of staying stuck, even if we are not researchers? How do we get beyond “the rage of bias”? How do we tame it so we don’t block progress in our personal greatness journey?

There is one way that can give greatness a boost toward fact-checking what we automatically see. Dale Carnegie’s book on “How to Win Friends and Influence People” alludes to it – "be interested rather than interesting". 

MIT’s Alex “Sandy” Pentland and many collaborators have corroborated Carnegie’s observations naming the concept as “social physics” and the top skill as “social sensitivity”. High performing teams are very good at this. The personality trait individually and collectively is “openness”. The process is one of respectful, equal opportunity debate that challenges us to examine our assumptions.

Taming the rage of blind bias is hard work. Without feedback from others, blindness can persist. With others who see reality through a different lens, we can test out the validity of what we know and believe. We can open our minds and mindsets to an information flow that might shed more light on reality.

When We Know Another Better, Blind Bias Has Less of a Chance to Rage

Globally, we are witnessing the difficulty of the hard work of reality-checking as the United States’ electorate ponders the nation’s next commander-in-chief.  People are working out their thinking, their views of each candidate to lead nationally and internationally. They are becoming more aware of Senator Clinton’s and Donald Trump’s personal and professional stories past and current. As a result, voters’ clarity of judgment has a chance to emerge with a more nuanced foundation. In turn, seeing greatness in a new light may have a chance.  

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.