Bias: Bad Habits of All of Us
How our worst habits probably aren’t poor diet and exercise
A few years ago I read an article that shared an anecdote about a surgeon who refused to perform surgery on a boy who was critically injured in an accident which also left his father dead. When prompted with why, the surgeon responded with “I can’t operate on this boy because he’s my son.” I paused for a moment trying to reconstruct the scene. I originally thought the surgeon was a tall, white, cis-gendered, straight man. According to the article, my assumptions were in the majority of those who also encountered this story. It’s not that I don’t think woman can be doctors — in fact it’s quite the opposite. I do my best to consciously use inclusive language and promote diversity through my work, however after reading that story I was not actually the person I considered myself to be.
We all like to think that we are good people who don’t have prejudice and we make a conscious effort to tell ourselves the obvious, that everyone should be equal and treated fairly. However, there are so many statistics that tell a different story. Where is the disconnect? Perhaps our biases and stereotypes come from bad habits formed collectively as a society.
A few nights ago, I just finished reading Hooked: How to Build Habit Forming Products by Nir Eyal and it reminded me of the jarring experience I had while reading that article a while back. In this book, Eyal outlines the “Hook Model” and how it is used to forms habits:
First it starts with a trigger, think of a notification on a smart phone, or the feeling of wanting to capture a moment so it is not lost forever. The action may be taking a picture and posting it to Facebook or Instagram, then it gets likes and comments from friends and followers until a whole collection of moments are stored in the product. Many of us do this without really thinking about it, and that is exactly what defines habit: a behavior with little or no conscious thought. When reading the story about the surgeon I did not spend any energy constructing my idea who that could be, the picture was already there before I could imagine it otherwise.
Breaking Down the Bias
Biases form similarly to the way habits do and so we can begin to look at them in the same way. However since biases are thoughts, the phases the ‘Hook Model’ creates an implicit learned belief rather than an explicit physical behavior.
Trigger: Physical, Verbal or Textual indication of a surgeon. Eyal describes internal and external triggers. External triggers can be used until eventually internal triggers are formed. In this case, the external trigger is the mention and physical indication of a surgeon. A quick stock photo search for ‘surgeon’ illustrates the the specific picture mass media portrays. Eventually, external triggers become internal triggers; one does not need to see a picture of a white man in greed scrubs in order to imagine one.
Action: The imaging of a white man in a blue/green scrubs. In this case, the action and the external trigger is closely tied so the occurrence of the thought is the action itself, but when the trigger becomes internal we turn to the Fogg Behavior Model for explanation. This model states that a behavior (or unconscious thought, in our case) can only occur when a trigger is accompanied by ability and motivation. The ability to imagine a while male surgeon is very easy because we are exposed to this representation so often, and our desire to be accepted socially and avoid rejection increases the motivation to think this way. The opposite is also true of this model. It is perhaps more difficult to first imagine a person of color or a person who is non-binary as a surgeon because of the lack of visibility in mainstream media.
Reward: Approval from Society that the image aligns with a cultural consensus. In Hooked, three kinds of variable reward systems are described: the hunt, the tribe and the self. In the case of the imagined surgeon, the reader is offered a hybrid of rewards of the tribe and the self. The tribe or our peers approve of cultural norms and reinforce them sometimes explicitly through praise or implicitly through portrayal in the media however, this is not necessarily present when reading the article but it feeds into the satisfaction that we believe the “right” thing.
Investment: Past thoughts of what a surgeon looks like and over-valuing time and energy building up a belief. Investments are made in a few ways according to Eyal: we irrationally over-value our efforts, we tend to be consistent with past behavior, and we want to avoid cognitive dissonance. Since biases start to form at birth, the investment period is a long one. We spend a lot of time looking to find social acceptance, and we often speak about our beliefs to friends, to strangers on the internet, to anyone who will listen and we avoid cognitive dissonance by rationalizing what we believe by thinking This must be true since everyone seems to believe it. After so many times conjuring an image of a male surgeon, I continued to have that same mental image.
Over and over again this cycle continues until we are broken from this mental model. In my case, it was an author who forced me to deconstruct my thinking so that she could better make her point.
How Bias is Different from Other Habits
A habit is pretty singular. Like nail biting or posting food pics to Instagram, it’s a solitary experience. In its simplest form, a habit is a closed circuit.
This is where bias differs. A person’s bias is created and shaped by interactions with others. Its is easy to imagine just one journey around the ‘Hook Model’ however, in reality everyone is at different points in their models, influencing and reinforcing the actions and beliefs of others. Easy examples of this are microaggressions, which, subtly punish those who aren’t aligned exactly with society’s expectations. We accept and dole out rewards without thinking and over time we build up value in what our beliefs are because they make up a huge part of our identity. The investments are made and we are “primed for the next trigger,” as Eyal puts and, where we are ready to move through the cycle again without any idea its happening.
A Resolution
How can we begin to change our learned beliefs to be more inclusive? Habits are a hot topic for Medium readers. If you search you will get dozens of posts surrounding the theme. Understanding how habits form can significantly influence how we might change them for good, in daily life. In Hooked the model suggested how product designers could design to influence the habits of users, but the outlined principles can extend far past apps. We can ask ourselves: why do we believe this? What triggered it? How does it make me feel and what can I do about it? Being mindful of behavior is the first step. Habits are tough to change, but thankfully, not impossible, and together we can kick the bias.
I highly recommend reading Nir Eyal’s Hooked: How to Build Habit Forming Products not just for fellow product designers but for anyone interested in the science of habits get formed and how to change them.
