Why are we so biased in our thinking? How we think is related to how much time we have to think. Thinking is much easier if we have time to make a cup of tea and analyse in depth any particular situation. But if time is short, and we need to interpret information quickly it is useful to have shortcuts that work most of the time. Unfortunately, these shortcuts are also a major source of error, or bias.
Shortcuts in thinking are useful to us. As I say in How the Brain Thinks we have always needed some quick way of analyzing threats, whether at a watering hole on the Savannah or around the water cooler at work.
One of the seminal papers on bias in cognitive psychology was from the Nobel Prize winners Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman in Science in September 1974. The paper is also reproduced in appendix A of Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011) by Daniel Kahneman, a book that sold over 2 million copies. That book provided a major incentive for me to write How the Brain Thinks in order to explain why bias happens.
Two major biases that Tversky and Kahneman discovered were those of representativeness and availability. If we are trying to answer the question ‘what is the probability that object A belongs to class B’, we often rely on the degree that A is similar to or looks like or represents B, rather than analyzing the pure percentage chance that A belongs to class B.
Similarly, availability is where we estimate the likelihood of an event happening by whether we can remember instances of the event happening. If instances of the event are easily available to recall we judge the likelihood to be high. The paper discusses many ways these biases can occur.
Now the neuroscience can explain this. In a paper in Nature Human Behaviour, Chunyue Teng and Dwight J Kravitz, suggest that ‘if neuronal resources in sensory areas are shared between VWM and bottom-up perceptual processing, the contents of VWM should interact directly with the perception of ongoing stimuli, simultaneously altering their appearance and being altered themselves.’
VWM is visual working memory, our minds eye, our ability to briefly maintain and manipulate information, and shares the same pathways as attention. If this influences the perception of the world around us, we can understand how bias may come about. Bias is not an inability to see things like a camera does, but an inability to interpret information appropriately in context. As always, this top down interpretation depends on time, and aspects of emotion, memory, culture and belief that VWM draws upon. The exigencies of VWM could also help to explain some of the many other biases that have been discovered, like confirmation bias, where we tend to make choices that we feel comfortable with.
We can now see that intermittently biased thinking is part of being human. The trick is to realize it and learn from it.
Being constantly biased though comes from somewhere else, and there are plenty of current common examples to illustrate this in politics today.
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Till next time.
