Why we must #BreakTheBias
And not just on International Women’s Day
8 March 2022 is International Women’s Day and the theme this year is #BreakTheBias. So I had to write about a favourite subject of mine — cognitive biases and what to do about them.
20 years ago, Daniel Kahneman won a Nobel Prize for his work on the subject. But cognitive biases have been around for millions of years or more.
Some call them defects. Bugs in our rational thinking 🐛 Others call them features, built in by evolution to make our lives easier. The science word is heuristic.
But no matter which word we use, we have to better understand what they are because they affect all of us, often negatively.
A cognitive bias is a shortcut thinking mechanism. A fast, back-of-the-envelope mental judgement. A workaround for a complex cognitive problem, which saves us from having to think too hard for too long.
Thinking is an energetically expensive activity. A typical brain consumes up to 20% of a person’s daily energy budget but accounts for only 2% of body weight. In a world of scarce energy supply, any evolutionary advantage to get at a good enough answer, much of the time, would have been welcome.
Here’s a simple question to give you the flavour. It’s Daniel’s most famous, most infamous example. You can skip to tl;dr if you already know what I’ve written. Or not. Your choice.
Linda is 31 years old, single, outspoken and very bright. As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice and also participated in antinuclear demonstrations.
Think about this background information for a few seconds before you answer a simple question.
Which is more probable?
1) Linda is a bank teller.
2) Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement.
If you answered 2… you would be in good company. 90% of undergraduates at several major universities chose the same. But the correct answer is 1.
Contrary to gut instinct, 2 is less likely, because of the added detail. The background information about Linda was a brazen distractor, encouraging our heuristic mind to make a snap judgement about her, contrary to the laws of probability.
The general case is always more probable. Adding detail only reduces the probability.
Or, to slightly change the language. She is a teller is more likely than she is a teller who wears black lipstick at the weekend. There are many more tellers in our world than tellers who also wear black lipstick. Or tellers who are also active in the feminist movement.
Sadly.
But if like most people, you answered 2 and you don’t understand why it is wrong, that’s ok. I’ve made Daniel’s point clear for you. The thinking behind this is not intuitive.
tl;dr
This is a simple example of a biased way of thinking. But we make such mistakes all the time. Far more than we realize.
Full confession: I got it wrong the first time too. My lame excuse? I care about gender equality and I wanted Linda to care too.
To my man, Daniel Kahneman… look at this idiotic fool that you made me 🤣🎹
I even have a maths degree from a top university.
We are subject to hundreds of known categories of bias. They riddle our minds. We are mostly unware of them, most of the time.
Even Daniel, my hero, has mused over the years as to whether he made any real progress with his own.
Personally, I think he’s being humble. Or maybe there’s another bias at work. Perhaps the more we learn, the more we realize how little we know and so we downplay our knowledge all the more.
There is much more to this than a short article can reveal.
But the battle for gender equality is real. As real as the suffering caused by its absence. Please, all of us… let us take it seriously, and not just for one day of the year.
#IWD2022 #BreakTheBias
Written with gratitude to J.L. — for your other half of the sky
