It’s election time! Suddenly, all our friends are experts in foreign policy, environmental regulation, economics, and all kinds of other things they never talk about except in election years. If only they realized how ignorant, irrational, and hideously unqualified to vote they all sounded. Not like us, of course. We’re completely educated on all the issues, rational, and gloriously qualified to vote. That’s why it’s good to be us!
Sadly, though, we are human. So we still have unconscious bias that can destroy our good decisions. Our brains sometimes feel certain about an issue, even when there’s no actual basis for the certainty. I was eating Szechuan Chicken once was absolutely certain that cute little red pepper would be super-easy to eat. And it was. If by “super-easy” you mean "strapped to a gurney screaming while being shuttled to the emergency room for an emergency tongue transplant.”
We have built-in biases that blind us to even the most obvious disasters right in front of our noses. Just take one look at 1970's fashion: flowery, embroidered bell bottoms worn with fringed leather vests. It took us years to truly realize the horror of what we’d done.
Biases Can Be Bad
Biases matter because they distort our world view. Our world view determines our actions and our actions determine the results we get. If we act on bias instead of reality, we get worse results.
Your boss gives you a hard assignment. If you believe your boss hates you, you think, “they’re torturing me!” and you quit. Oops! It turns out your boss gave you a hard assignment because you’re up for promotion to Lesser Grand Poobah. This assignment would prove your worth to the Council of Poobahs. If you had known the truth, rather than your false belief, you might be lounging around the Lesser Grand Poohbah Den at this very moment.
Your Rants Reveal Your Biases
When electing someone to run a gigantic country, you’ll get the best outcome by choosing a candidate wisely. Sadly, when politics are involved, our rational brain takes a holiday, and our hysterical screeching monkey brain takes over. This happens to me, too. This year, however, I developed an anti-bias exercise to help.
One bias is that whatever we’re hearing about is what we think is important. When we hear about candidate A, we keep abreast of one set of topics. With candidate B, another set of topics rises up. We end up not evaluating the candidates equally.
You Can Compare Apples and Oranges
Bernice is shopping for fruit trees to offer for sale at her plant store, Green Growing Things. As she walks past apples, she thinks, “That looks just like the apple from Sleeping Beauty! And there’s one that’s perfect for archery practice!” Pretty soon, she’s sure she wants to branch out into apples!
Until she sees the oranges. They’re such a beautiful color. So beautiful, in fact, that someone should name a color after them! But sadly, there aren’t any magical uses for a Valencia orange. (That she knows of. Bwah hah hah hah hah!!)
Which should she choose? Apples seem to be the winner, since they’re good for magic and archery. Oranges, though, win on color. She’s using different criteria to judge the different options. If you weren’t a super-smart, deep thinker like me, you might be tempted to conclude you can’t compare apples and oranges.
But you’d be wrong. We’re so awesome, we can compare apples and oranges—and thus make a better decision than we would otherwise.
Create Universal Criteria
First, list every pro or con you can think of for apples. Bernice lists: useful for sleeping spells, great for balancing on a teenager’s head as an archery target. Do Tell! Oranges suck for magic, but they’re really colorful. Her list contains: magic utility, archery utility, and color. Now she adds other criteria that seem relevant but didn’t come to mind earlier. Since this is a business, Bernice adds sales potential as another criterion.
I was shocked when this exercise showed that my decisions were sexist, despite what I thought was fair judgment.
Now she draws a column for Apples and a column for Oranges on the page. She rates both along all the criteria that she used for either. Apples get high magic and archery. She hadn’t been thinking about color and sales when browsing, but now that she does, they get poor marks for color. There are too many colors, making it hard to accessorize. Plus, they score low in sales potential. Apple pie is so 1776.
Oranges score low in magic, high in color—and now that she reflects–high in sales potential (they’re very 21st century) and super-high in archery value. There’s no better way to spend an afternoon than shooting arrows at orange that are rolling off an ungrateful teenager’s head.
Surprise! Oranges have three pros and one con, while apples have only two pros. It’s an incredible upset and oranges win! But only because we overcame our biases by deliberately listing all our criteria and evaluating all the options.
Make an Unbiased Political Decision
In this election, it’s easy to get worked up. So write down all your fears and hopes about each candidate. If you have trouble thinking of the fears and hopes, just browse your Facebook wall. It will give you hints. As will the list of people you’ve unfriended, if you go back and recall what they said that destroyed your friendship forever.
Make your hopes and fears for each candidate into a master list of what you care about in a presidential candidate. Then add anything else you think is important. You’ll end up things like “quality of speaking voice,” “chances of starting world war 3 by accident,” and “has sensible fiscal policies that reflect a Rawlesian theory of distributive justice.” Next, rate all the candidates on all the criteria. When you look over your each candidate along every dimension, you may find your thinking has shifted.
Personally, I discovered my criteria had a definite gender bias. I considered myself a non-sexist person and was shocked when this exercise showed me that wasn’t so. I watched the next debate imagining both candidates in a pink tutu. That pretty much eliminated the gender bias and allowed me to concentrate on the issues.
When electing the President of a powerful country, don’t accidentally apply only some of your criteria to each candidate. You make a very bad choice that way. Instead, evaluate all the candidates using all your criteria. Then, and only then, will you have any hope of making a good choice that’s unclouded by unconscious bias.
So do the work it takes to make sure you’re making a good decision. Remember: we don’t want criminals running the country, we do want professionals. That means no cons, only pros.
This is Stever Robbins. Follow GetItDoneGuy on Twitter and Facebook. I run programs to help people have Extraordinary Lives and extraordinary careers. If you want to know more, visit SteverRobbins.com
Work Less, Do More, and Have a Great Life!
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