Cognitive Biases: Fooling Ourselves in the Name of Efficiency

“It’s not at all hard to understand a person; it’s only hard to listen without bias.” — Criss Jami, author

I often ponder something that cognitive scientist Dr. Daniel Willingham has said about humans as thinkers. We are good at thinking. We have and continue to solve some pretty complex problems. However, we’re lazy thinkers. Our brains don’t like to work any harder than they have to. As such, we often look for short cuts that allow us not to expend too much mental energy in solving a problem or in making a decision.

These mental short cuts or heuristics as they are called allow us to make many decisions throughout the day without subjecting ourselves to excessive cognitive load. This frees us up to commit serious mental resources to the things that really matter — like complex problems or updating your status on social media.

Often times these heuristics serve their purpose and help us make decisions quickly and efficiently, cognitively speaking. At other times, taking short cuts can get us into trouble. We apply them to the wrong contexts and at the wrong times. Heuristics gone sour in this way are often referred to as cognitive biases or implicit biases.

In that sense of the term then, we’re all biased. Often we don’t even know it or realize it. Growing up, I was quite used to thinking of good guys wearing white (Luke Skywalker) and bad guys black (Darth Vader). I even made a reference to that to a group of college students I was instructing in a human kinetics class once. The game I was showing them was even called Star Wars and when I said to one student that he could be the bad guy since he was (wearing) black, many of the male students in the class went into a frenzy. Immediately their interpretation of what I had said became clear to me. Black equals black person and I was saying that black people are bad. I had to explain that the white student, that was wearing a black t-shirt, that I targeted meant that that student could fulfill the role of Darth Vader in the game we were about to play. For anyone else out there in need of a pop culture lesson from the 70’s and 80’s, Darth Vader was the key villain in the first three Star Wars movies. Obviously that wasn’t as explicit to a group of twenty-something students in the year 2014.

So, we’re all biased. What to do now? The first thing is acknowledge and accept that fact. Seth Godin reminds us that professionals know they are biased and work to cull the biases that hurt while keeping the biases that help.

How does bias impact you as a teacher? Or as a learner? This is certainly something for all of us to think about and reflect on. I’ll explore the topic of cognitive biases further next time around.