We are talking about cognitive bias here. Here is the original article. https://betterhumans.coach.me/cognitive-bias-cheat-sheet-55a472476b18#.mr0fch53m
When you are listening to the Mogadishu radio play, you will be building up a picture in your mind, using the direct evidence, what you already know, and what you THINK you know.
This picture will be naturally biased.
Knowing about these potential biases means that we can begin to adjust the picture we are painting of the case study to make it more accurate.
Problem 1: Too much information.
There is just too much information in the world, we have no choice but to filter almost all of it out. Our brain uses a few simple tricks to pick out the bits of information that are most likely going to be useful in some way.
You will think that the radio play is simple, but as you delve deeper into the detail you will find that there is too much information to cope with over 25 scenes. So you will be tempted to ignore details and create a thumbnail sketch of the whole situation, with the risk over looking the important details.
- We notice things that are already primed in memory or repeated often. What issues or ideas are you encountering in the play that are repeated, or have you come across before and which make you more sensitive to them?
- Bizarre/funny/visually-striking/anthropomorphic things stick out more than non-bizarre/unfunny things. What events, words and characters have struck you as odd or funny, weird? have they stuck in your head more than the ‘normal’ people or comments?
- We notice when something has changed. Has a character said or done something out of character? have you noticed that, but not where a character is behaving consistently?
- We are drawn to details that confirm our own existing beliefs. This is a BIG one! It’s going to take a while before you begin to understand what you believe in and why, before you begin to see how that affects what you observe.
- We notice flaws in others more easily than flaws in ourselves. Which characters do you not like? Who do you disapprove of?
Problem 2: Not enough meaning.
The world is very confusing, and we end up only seeing a tiny sliver of it, but we need to make some sense of it in order to survive. Once the reduced stream of information comes in, we connect the dots, fill in the gaps with stuff we already think we know, and update our mental models of the world.
Even though there is a lot of detail in the radio play, it leave 99% of the details of what is actually going on between the scenes completely unknown. You are going to be trying to fill in the details. Mark will be providing some of those missing details, but cannot write every minute of every day into this case study, so what strategies will you use to fill in the gaps?
- We find stories and patterns even in sparse data. Are you creating backstories in your mind? Are you relating the story here to other events and stories that you have experienced before?
- We fill in characteristics from stereotypes, generalities, and prior histories whenever there are new specific instances or gaps in information. Sociology is primarily aimed at getting us to rethink these stereotypes and prejudices. So you need to spot where you have done this
- We imagine things and people we’re familiar with or fond of as better than things and people we aren’t familiar with or fond of. We fill in the gaps in any story with the ideas and myths that we have encountered before. What are your favourite stories?
- We simplify probabilities and numbers to make them easier to think about. There are no numbers in this case, no maths, but there are probabilities. How likely is it that someone is going to physically abuse another character?
- We think we know what others are thinking. In some cases this means that we assume that they know what we know, in other cases we assume they’re thinking about us as much as we are thinking about ourselves. Are you predicting that the characters in the play are going to act in a certain way? What evidence and assumptions are you using to predict that behaviour?
- We’re not very good at imagining how quickly or slowly things will happen or change over time. Serious case reviews are littered with observations that events progressed very rapidly. What seems to be an innocent situation may escalate very rapidly in a short space of time, perhaps whilst you are waiting for a colleague to plan a meeting.
Problem 3: Need to act fast.
We’re constrained by time and information, and yet we can’t let that paralyze us. Without the ability to act fast in the face of uncertainty, we surely would have perished as a species long ago. With every piece of new information, we need to do our best to assess our ability to affect the situation, apply it to decisions, simulate the future to predict what might happen next, and otherwise act on our new insight.
Our work is often a very high-pressure job, with lots of cases going on at the same time, a lot of paperwork that is crucial to capture and pass on information, and when situations are escalating rapidly, you are expected to act swiftly.
- In order to act, we need to be confident in our ability to make an impact and to feel like what we do is important. In reality, most of this confidence can be classified as overconfidence, but without it we might not act at all. When you were listening to the play, at which points did you find yourself confident that you understood what was going on, and then later found yourself to be wrong?
- In order to stay focused, we favour the immediate, relatable thing in front of us over the delayed and distant. At which points were you thinking that you wanted to act now to deal with the situation, rather than later? This is a difficult balance, between acting quickly as a situation escalates, and acting slowly to ensure you have the correct information and understand the situation better.
- In order to get anything done, we’re motivated to complete things that we’ve already invested time and energy in. This is like the ‘don’t spend more time on a mistake, even though you have invested a lot of time on it’ sort of meme. Did you, when first listening to the play, invest a lot of thought and energy into one character or situation, only to find that someone else is more important?
- In order to avoid mistakes, we’re motivated to preserve our autonomy and status in a group, and to avoid irreversible decisions. If we must choose, we tend to choose the option that is perceived as the least risky or that preserves the status quo. Better the devil you know than the devil you do not. This is especially a risk when we are new to a job- we don’t want to make decisions that might ‘rock the boat’ or upset our colleagues.
- We favor options that appear simple or that have more complete information over more complex, ambiguous options. We’d rather do the quick, simple thing than the important complicated thing, even if the important complicated thing is ultimately a better use of time and energy. This is my favourite problem. Many people will say to you (as a boss once said to me) ‘keep it simple, stupid’. There is a lot of pressure to reduce a problem to simple causes. Where are you ignoring important details? Where are you making the story too simple?
Problem 4: What should we remember?
There’s too much information in the universe. We can only afford to keep around the bits that are most likely to prove useful in the future. We need to make constant bets and trade-offs around what we try to remember and what we forget
Remembering details before we know what is important is a vital skill. There is a saying in academic research that states that ‘everything is data’. This means that every detail could be important in the future, but we don’t know what information will be important. This means that we ‘should’ remember everything, but we can’t. Instead, we should try and be aware of what we are more likely to remember.
- We edit and reinforce some memories after the fact. During that process, memories can become stronger, however various details can also get accidentally swapped.
- We discard specifics to form generalities. We do this out of necessity, but the impact of implicit associations, stereotypes, and prejudice results in some of the most glaringly bad consequences from our full set of cognitive biases.
- We reduce events and lists to their key elements. It’s difficult to reduce events and lists to generalities, so instead we pick out a few items to represent the whole.
- We store memories differently based on how they were experienced. We are only listening to a play at the moment, but in practice you will be experiencing stories like this with your eyes, your hands, your sense of smell, not just your ears.
- We don’t see everything. Some of the information we filter out is actually useful and important.
Our search for meaning can conjure illusions. We sometimes imagine details that were filled in by our assumptions, and construct meaning and stories that aren’t really there.
Quick decisions can be seriously flawed. Some of the quick reactions and decisions we jump to are unfair, self-serving, and counter-productive.
Our memory reinforces errors. Some of the stuff we remember for later just makes all of the above systems more biased, and more damaging to our thought processes.
By the time you have worked your way to this stage, you may have forgotten where this work comes from. You should now read the whole of the original article, paying particular attention to clicking through the links to the various cognitive biases to learn about them in more detail. Here is the original article. https://betterhumans.coach.me/cognitive-bias-cheat-sheet-55a472476b18#.mr0fch53m
