Perception vs. Reality: The Bias of Decision-Making
Perception & crossword puzzles
I was recently reading an article about a seemingly random topic—how they create the Saturday crossword puzzle in the New York Times. They talked about how it can be hard to create great clues that lead solvers to the correct word because, “Anecdotally speaking, I could run a clue that involves wordplay by 10 different solvers and I would probably get at least three unique interpretations of the clue, maybe more.” Then went on to mention some troublesome clues that even the crossword creators had a hard time with, including, “‘Reform?’ is another clue that has multiple meanings. Which one came to mind first for you? Was it to improve or to change shape?”
Why is this happening—why do different people read a clue completely differently… perhaps even in ways that the experts making these clues haven’t thought of?
How perception warps reality
There is a famous, anonymous quote, “We see things not as they are, but as we are.” While we all may be looking at the same thing, experiencing the same event, or going through the same experience, we can see it completely differently. This has to do with our learned experiences, the way we were raised by our family, the culture or cultures that we grew up in, etc. Most of these influences are invisible to us, and we often feel that others think and act (or should think and act) more like we do.
Bias, illusion, & fast or system 1 thinking
We all have biases; it’s part of being human. Our brains are like supercomputers, but they have their limits. There are so many stimuli in the world around us that we get from all of our senses that our brains can’t possibly absorb them all. So, our brains take shortcuts—this is why optical and auditory illusions work.
B. Laeng et al., The Eye Pupil Adjusts to Illusorily Expanding Holes, Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 2022
One of my favorite optical illusions is the black hole. Big Think has a great article about what exactly is going on when we look at the center of this image (essentially your brain is showing you what it thinks is going to happen next—that you will be going into a dark tunnel). What isn’t going on? It isn’t moving. It’s a static image. But even if you know that, it’s almost impossible (for most people) to get your brain to stop seeing it as moving.
When you make gut-instinct, quick responses to stimuli, it is often referred to as fast or system 1 thinking. It’s the automatic response you have to any number of things. That’s fine when you’re in a survival situation or if you are getting tricked by an illusion. The problem comes when you rely on that same type of thinking to make decisions that end up negatively impacting others. And, we rely on fast thinking a lot.
Our brains are lazy and want to do the best they can to conserve time and energy and to maintain our safety. Slow or system 2 thinking is hard and requires a conscious decision to slow down and really think something through. Without some knowledge about how you think and process information (metacognition) and without practice to make slower thinking a habit, most of us will never see, let alone be able to overcome our biases.
False consensus bias
Many common types of biases plague us, but this one, in particular, makes it hard to connect with others who are different from us. Why? Because the false consensus bias convinces us that others are much more similar to us than they really are. We assume that since we think something is immoral or impolite, others do as well; that because we like something, others do; that the way we do things is the way everyone does them. In reality, even within a fairly homogeneous group, opinions, beliefs, customs, and practices can vary widely. If you start putting people together who are also from different cultures or have different life experiences, you get an unimaginable amount of variety. Literally unimaginable. Because we believe that our way is “the” way, we don’t even conceive of other possibilities.
Deep culture vs. surface culture
How different are we? Very. We are all a product of our culture. When we hear “culture” many of us think of things like language, food, clothing, music, holidays, art, etc. These are what’s called surface or external culture. Surface culture makes up very little of our overall culture and is often referred to as the tip of an iceberg with deep or internal culture making up much more (hence the aptly named Cultural Iceberg theory).
As you can see from this illustration, deep culture makes up not only more of our overall culture, but makes up the very things that many of us feel are only done a certain way (i.e., body language, self, time, cooperation, friendship, courting, sin, death, religion, decision-making, and problem-solving). Deep culture is very hard to understand or change because it’s implicitly or unconsciously learned.
Let’s say you have social interactions with someone who has completely different ideas of personal space, modesty, and manners—you’ll both likely come away feeling that the other person was out of line or rude (maybe worse). If you’re working with someone who has different ideas about time, leadership, responsibility, cooperation vs. competition, and problem-solving, it may not only be logistically tough, but negative emotions may start coming up without the other person having any idea why.
What can you do… and why is it so important?
Knowledge and education are obviously vital. Doing some research about others’ cultures can help you understand where they’re coming from and how they see the world. That may help you build a better relationship. However, knowledge only goes so far.
“If knowledge was the answer, we’d all be billionaires with six pack abs”—Derek Sivers
I love this quote because it’s funny, and so true. We all know how to get better abs (diet and exercise), but find it extremely hard to do. If knowledge is only the beginning, the next step has to be practice, application, and the building of habits. You have to actually go to the gym and eat well on a regular, consistent basis to see physical results.
The same is true for your brain. If you want to start improving your perception, being able to see the world as others do, using slower (system 2) thinking, and overcoming your biases, you have to practice.
While certainly not the only way, VTS (Visual Thinking Strategies) has been a proven method for improving thinking patterns and habits since the 1980s. Over time, simply participating in VTS discussions not only trains your brain to ask for evidence rather than allowing it to settle for snap judgments, it also uses the format of an open dialogue to show you just how differently others see things, which helps to trains your brain to more readily accept that there may be more than one possible answer.
Overcoming biases and accepting multiple possible answers has implications for creativity and innovation, relationship-building and communication, but also for things that are much more important. Things like fighting racism, sexism, ableism (and other -isms); creating truly inclusive environments and communities where all feel heard and valued; training those who have to make quick life or death decisions to make those decisions based on better evidence than assumptions (i.e., law enforcement, medicine, intelligence, military).
