Bias is part of how your brain works

I’m afraid there’s no way round it: you are biased, and there’s nothing you can do about it. What’s more, knowing that you’re biased does nothing to stop your biases operating — if anything, it can actually make their effects stronger, because you become overconfident and stop looking out for them.

Calling them ‘biases’ is a bit misleading, because they’re really part of the way our mind works so we can survive in the world. Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky started identifying them in the 1970s, when researching the way we make decisions. They’re the mental tools that we use to make reliable sense of the huge amount of data coming in at us at any given moment. In many circumstances they’re extremely useful to us, but in some they aren’t.

Since they’re automatic, we cannot eliminate them. Instead, we need to find a way to work with them.

Detailed thought and decision-making is energy intense — it uses a lot of glucose — and our minds are set up to help us conserve energy. So, often, when we try and answer a complicated question, to save energy, our mind substitutes a simpler question — and we have no way of knowing this has happened!

This is how advertising works: there are so many brands of yoghurt. How can we chose which is best from the supermarket shelves? It’s much easier for us to answer the question ‘which brand am I most familiar with’ — and so our minds sneakily answer that question, and tell us this is the answer to ‘which brand is best’. (This is called “the halo effect”). Our amazing sense-making engines then kick in, and supply (after the fact) all the reasons why we knew this was the best brand.

It’s important to remember that we are all doing this all the time. It is not a moral failing. It is not stupidity. It is the way the equipment works.