The Shadow of Bias on Leadership (2)
In the previous blog, we talked about the organizational practices that we could implement to reduce the effect of the biases that are held by all individuals. In my soon-to-be-published book The Shadow of Bias on Leadership — How to Improve your Team’s Productivity and Performance though Inclusion, I provide a long list of potential actions, backed up by research, that would help any organization reduce those prejudices that may taint our decision-making process.
Organizations are made of individuals. Geert Hofstede defined culture as the programming of the mind that differentiates one group of individuals from another and that differentiation occurs at the individual level. Hence, it will help to understand why we think the way we do. Where do those biases and prejudices come from? Am I a “bad” person when I have those biased thoughts? Is it wrong that I have a tendency to be attracted to individuals more like me and suspicious of those that are very different? The answers reside on our prehistorical brains.
As we have seen before, our brain is programmed to make us survive as long as possible. Everything is usually does is unconsciously done to make us live longer and expand our biological footprint through reproduction. I read an article several years ago that theorized that when things are going well for an individual (not many external threats, plenty of food, peace, social harmony…), the unconscious priority for the individual is long lives — live long and prosper. When things are more complicated because of war, hardships and other negative impacting events that may shorten our lives, we switch to reproducing as much as possible, and the sooner the better.
And in our modern lives where hardships are few and long in between, and are not likely to threaten our lives, the brain still behaves in the same manner as it did many thousands of years ago. When we feel exposed to danger, our amygdala kicks in and we get ready to fight, flee or freeze… but this time the danger comes from a colleague questioning the data from our presentation, or our boss walking in the office and saying “we need to talk” and walking away to answer a phone call. The effects of those events have the same physiological effects as a saber-toothed tiger jumping out from a bush thousands of years ago. Our adrenaline goes up getting as ready to run, our cortisol levels go up to ease consumption of sugar and “disabling” irrelevant systems such as white cell production to fight infections. Except that the threats are completely different in nature. Frequency is also different among both events — you can only be surprised by a saber-toothed tiger so many times, but you probably encounter your boss several times a day. And I am certain your boss is a very nice person that should be compared a prehistoric blood-thirsty animal.
Our brains have developed biases to allow us to quickly filter information. When that information is not complete, and due to our dislike of ambiguity (again, not a good thing in the VUCA worlds that we inhabit), it just fill in the blanks with past experiences, developing patterns. Those patterns are not usually that reliable and we still rely on them on a daily basis. You see steam coming up from a cup of liquid, you assume that it is a hot beverage, not a cup of liquid nitrogen or dry ice (carbon dioxide).
The same thing happens with people — we may have been exposed to a certain type of individual through personal experience, social media or, within our in-group, our tribe, certain perceptions may have been communicated. Those perceptions could be something like “very smart”, “dangerous”, “excellent food!” or “funny people”. Just think about what images came to your head as you read those descriptions. Did you think about anyone in particular? Any group of people in particular? Most likely the answer will be “yes”, and those thoughts would be different depending on who you are, where you were raised, by whom you were raised, your live experiences, and other factors.
One of my favorite books is The Nature of Prejudiceby Gordon Allport. This book was written in 1954 and describes what relevant prejudices that one would encounter at that time. Most people then were suspicious of Italian and Irish immigrants, for example. If one could do a “Replace All” and change those cultural identities to today’s main immigrants — Chinese, Mexican, Muslim…- take you pick- the book will be as true now as it was then, over 6 decades ago. Kind of sad but very telling — our human nature is difficult to change and is very slow to evolve.
In 1974, Tversky and Kahneman wrote a marvelous paper on the limited number of heuristics or mental shortcuts that we used to come up with our conclusions. We rely on certain anchors to facilitate reaching conclusions quickly and effectively… And in that effort to be so productive, we sacrifice accuracy. We have a tendency to jump to the wrong conclusions when dealing with people, projecting our own filters to what we see, hear or how we read emotions or facial expressions.
Kahneman went on to write one of the best books on cognitive processing, Thinking, fast and Slow. In that book, the noble prize winner described the two cognitive system that we use in our decision-making process — Type 1, the intuitive cognitive process, the fast-effortless process; and Type 2, the reflective cognitive process, the slow, rational, and logical process.
When one looks at the research and writings on those topics, a clear picture comes up on why we think the way we do — and the answer lies on human nature. In my next blog, I will expand on how self-awareness can help us manage some of those human tendencies.
