Living Amidst Biases
We live in a world of biases. Funny thing is we never realise it ,until we are at the receiving end of the stick. Let me talk about my life a little. I grew up in a fairly moderate Bengali family. My dad and mom were in the Army. We had to travel a lot across India in my initial years but then we stabilised in Lucknow, which is where I did most of my schooling. Life was simple yet full of biases which were naked to the human eye. Maybe you aren't interested in thinking about biases. One of the biases that my family suffered from is the bias where you consider people from other castes, who work for you, different from you and serve them tea in special glasses only meant for them. My mother cited hygiene reasons but scientifically it doesn't make any sense. The odds that the sweeper or gardener has a foul contegious disease equal the odds to that of a respectable guest who is served in regular cups and glasses. Unfortunately my family still believes in this bias. It is a social stigma to entertain or host people from lower castes in a major part of India even now when we are talking about colonising Mars. It's silly and irrational yet it is there as part of a social evil.
Let's us talk a bit about these biases and how they affect us. There is a popular bias called 'Survivorship Bias' which a larger part of the diaspora suffers from. As part of this bias a lot of people actually believe that following the lifestyle of a successful personality could prompt them to be equally successful. A lot of parents ask their kids to emulate a successful personality or some in their social circles who seemed to do a bit of things before he became a little successful. Unfortunately what a lot of people discount the fact that there is perhaps a much larger sample set of people who followed the lifestyle of a successful person and still failed.The bias doesn't let us see the larger sample set and we base our life on a celebrity and dream of being as successful as one can imagine by aping her actions.
Let's talk about another popular bias called 'Confirmation Bias'. In confirmation bias, one believes in an ideology so deeply that even if the ideology is incorrect, the said person finds literature to prove his theory correct. If we look around us, we'd find this specific bias at play all day long. People are so much sold out on philosophies or ideologies at an intuitive level that they have no reason to suspect the authenticity of the theory. Its almost similar to 'Mandela Effect' but with a few variations. People afflicted with 'Mandela Effect' tend to recreate events in the past with insane levels of conviction, even though the event is completely fictitious in nature. Confirmation bias could take one away from the actual truth.
James Clear talks about these biases in detail in his website. Most of these biases are known to psychologists for many decades. These biases tend to affect our decision making process and hamper productivity. There close to 200 plus cognitive biases that a human mind suffers from. But some of these biases are due to our socio economic and geopolitical conditioning. The biggest problem with biases is that one never realises even for a split second the impact the bias has had on his life. Facebook recently unveiled a set of unconscious biases that affects a recruiting manager's performance. Lazlo Bock too talks about such biases in his bestselling book 'Work Rules'. In India as much as I can remember, after I returned form the US, I think the corporate utopia seems to suffer from a lot of biases.
Let me cite a bias that I've discussed on LinkedIn a few dozen times but it still seems to impede our cognition. A lot of organisations tend to be biased when it comes to hiring people because they have a conception that great talent stems from premier institutes in India. In actuality, talent has never been a function of pedigree. The reason why people think that way is because of the availability heuristic. Most hiring managers tend to see the percentage of successful people hailing from Ivy League Colleges. They don't have the actual numbers about most people who even without a degree managed to make it big and statistically it's a much larger number. Its availability heuristic that tends to shape their thought process and lead them far away from the truth. Take a look at this advertisement and see for yourself.
I've witnessed a lot of such biases in the industry and here are a few frivolous ones that one finds quite often.
If a person is more experienced then he might not be as sharp as a young employee.
One needs to have a designation, next to his name to prove his competence in the discipline. So if you're an ace product manager yet you've never had a product manager desig, chances are your CV might not be shortlisted.
If one is honest, straightforward, contrarian, has radical ideas and not a conformist then he is sure to be arrogant.
Business guys cannot be good at technology and vice versa.
People who have stayed abroad and speak much accented English are really smart.
Women cannot be effective leaders due to their insanely high empathy levels.
A person out of job for some time might not have the right skill sets for a job.
An entrepreneur looking for a job might not be a stable choice for any company.
Coding is the only way through which one can creatively think and solve problems.
Data can explain every aspect of consumer behaviour.
People from rural regions might not watch English movies or series(I got the shock of my life when I went to UP East and saw a bunch of gus watching GoT on their mobiles).
People not from Ivy Leagues cannot run a successful startup.
There is a common bias a lot of consumer tech companies in India tend to suffer from. I fact I wrote about it in a blog I wrote for customer centricity. It's called 'Empathy Gap'. It is a cognitive bias in which 'people in one state of mind' fail to understand 'people in another state of mind'. Its quite common and is actually the difference between customer service and customer delight, something that has plagued customer satisfaction surveys for quite some time. As I write this blog , there would be a million use cases where this bias would be screwing up the customer's experience thereby nullifying any chance the company had of delighting its customers.
The list is endless and I could just go on and on. Especially in India which is a seemingly immature business ecosystem, such biases are quite common. We are a rudimentary ecosystem and we've had just 30 years to our industrial revolution that started post 90s. Most of the jobs that we see today in tech are quite new in nature. This explains why we still trying to figure out a lot of things and let our worldview run things for us. That might backfire since our worldviews run on a plethora of biases that have plagued us all our lives. We unconsciously let our biases take over and affect our decision making process. Daniel Kahneman explains the process in detail in his cult book 'Thinking Fast and Slow'. Immanuel Kent and David Hume dedicated a larger part of their lives in unraveling human nature. Most of what they found, has to do a lot with emotions and consciousness seems to play a very vital role in that. If you look at a larger set of decisions which are based in irrationality, you'd find there is an active role body chemicals play in shaping our behaviour. I can't help but mention Professor Robert Sapolsky's name who has become a global icon in behavioural sciences and tends to explain human nature through behavioural biology and neuroscience. Take a look at these interesting videos
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1AwNCb0XciU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORthzIOEf30
We might have encrypted human DNA but we are far from making progress in understanding human behaviour. It will perhaps take us through another 50 to 100 years before we cross the final frontier and understand the human mind in more clarity. But till then we could at least try and understand biases and how they shape our decisions. Technology could help us with a lot of things but it can't help us understand human behaviour. The larger question is, "How will AI be perfect if the humans who created the AI suffer from a set of cognitive biases". And nothing can be as dangerous as a biased AI. Take a look at this picture. Who do you think the self driving car should save?
Conclusively I'd say that bias has dominated this world as much as bacteria has :)
Unless we consciously decide to go through our personal biases and eradicate them, we as a capitalistic society would be sacrificing innovation, creativity, productivity ,time and a lot of money. That would perhaps be a roadblock to the creation of an egalitarian and meritocratic society. Sad thing is most of us won't even know the extent of the damage done till Lucifer comes calling.