Mind-set: The Mother of All Biases

Mind-set

In this extract from The Thinker’s Toolkit, Morgan D. Jones argues that established perspectives shape what we notice and how readily we accept an explanation. The first-person commentary and historical examples are his.

The mother of all biases is the “mind-set.” Each of us, over time, as we acquire more and more knowledge about a subject, develops a comprehensive, overall perspective on it, as in President Ronald Reagan’s famous view of the Soviet Union as an “evil empire.” We call such a perspective a mind-set, which refers to the distillation of our accumulated knowledge about a subject into a single, coherent framework or lens through which we view it. A mind-set is therefore the summation or consolidation of all of our biases about a particular subject.

A mind-set thus exerts a powerful influence, usually for the best, on how we interpret new information by spontaneously placing that information in a preformed, ready-made context. For example, when we learn that a close relative has died, we instantaneously experience various sentiments generated by our mind-set concerning that relative. We don’t first systematically recall and reexamine all of our interactions with that person, gauge our reactions to each one, and then decide to feel remorse about the person’s death. The feelings come upon us in a flash; we don’t think about them before we sense them. Such is the power of mind-set.

Upon learning from a radio sports program that our favorite team has won a particular game, our mind-set on that team makes us pleased. But we are ambivalent about the results of other games because we have not developed mind-sets on the teams involved. When we read a novel, the personality of a particular character evolves from page to page as the author furnishes us bits of information about the character’s life, desires, fears, and such. At some point, our absorption and interpretation of these small details solidify into a particular mind-set. If the author is skilled, this mind-set is precisely the one he or she intended us to acquire. We perceive the character as good or evil, happy or sad, ambitious or content and interpret the character’s thoughts, statements, and actions within the framework of this manufactured mind-set.

Mind-sets enable us to interpret events around us quickly and to function effectively in the world. We unconsciously acquire mind-sets about everything—friends, relatives, neighbors, countries, religions, TV programs, authors, political parties, businesses, law firms, government agencies, whatever. These mind-sets enable us to put events and information immediately into context without having to reconstruct from memory everything of relevance that previously happened. If I ask you, “What do you think of the collapse of health care reform?” you know instantly what I’m talking about. I don’t have to explain the question. Mind-sets therefore provide us instant insight into complex problems, enabling us to make timely, coherent, and accurate judgments about events. Without mind-sets, the complexity and ambiguity of these problems would be unmanageable, if not paralyzing.

Being an aggregate of countless biases and beliefs, a mind-set represents a giant shortcut of the mind, dwarfing all others the mind secretly takes to facilitate thinking and decision making. The influence a mindset has on our thinking is thus magnified by many orders of magnitude over that of a simple bias, such as the way I shave in the morning. For that reason, mind-sets are immensely powerful mechanisms and should be regarded both with awe for the wonderful ease with which they facilitate our functioning effectively as humans and with wariness for their extraordinary potential to distort our perception of reality.

Consider, for example, the observation of newspaper columnist William Raspberry concerning the pretrial hearing of O. J. Simpson for the murder of his former wife and her friend: “Sixty percent of black Americans believe O. J. Simpson is innocent of the murder charges against him; 68 percent of white Americans believe him guilty. How can two groups of people, watching the same televised proceedings, reading the same newspapers, hearing the same tentative evidence, reach such diametrically opposed conclusions?” The answer, of course, is—mind-sets.

Donna Britt, a Washington Post newspaper columnist, writing about racism’s influence on the public’s pretrial attitudes concerning Simpson’s culpability, said that some blacks believe that no black person can be guilty of wrongdoing, no matter what the accusation or evidence. She said these blacks have an ingrained cultural memory of their men being dragged away into the night, never to be seen again; they have grappled with racism, have found it staring at them, taunting them, affecting them so often that sometimes they see it even when it isn’t there: “It can obscure people’s vision so completely that they can’t see past it…. Some stuff goes so deep, we may never get past it.”

The case of the mysterious explosion on the battleship U.S.S. Iowa, which serves as the subject of one of the exercises in Chapter 11, presents another example of a mind-set. An article in U.S. News & World Report described how different people interpreted the personal belongings in the bedroom of Seaman Clayton Hartwig, whom the Navy suspected of intentionally causing the explosion: “Indeed, the lines of dispute are so markedly drawn that Hartwig’s bedroom seems emblematic of the whole case. Some see only a benign collection of military books and memorabilia. Others see criminal psychosis in the very same scene.”

Once a mind-set has taken root, it is extremely difficult to dislodge because it is beyond the reach of our conscious mind. And unless we carefully analyze our thinking, we probably won’t be aware that we have a particular mind-set. The question then is, if we aren’t aware of our biases and mind-sets, how can we protect ourselves against their pernicious negative effects? It seems to be a Catch-22.

There is only one way to change undesirable biases and mind-sets, and that is by exposing ourselves (our minds) to new information and letting the mind do the rest. Fortunately, the mind is, to a large degree, a self-changing system. (You will note I didn’t say “self-correcting.” The correctness of a bias or mind-set is determined entirely by the culture in which it exists.) Give the mind new information, and it will change the bias. We sample a food we’ve always avoided, only to discover it tastes good. We read a book by an author we have always detested, only to find we enjoy her writing. We are forced by circumstances to collaborate on a project with someone we have always disliked, and we end up liking that person.

Most biases and mind-sets, however, are highly resistant to alteration and are changed only gradually, eroded away by repeated exposure to new information. An example was white America’s awakening bit by bit through the 1950s and ’60s to the reality and evils of racial discrimination. Some biases and mind-sets are so deeply rooted that they can be corrected only by truth shock treatment. After the capitulation of the Nazi regime in World War II, many German citizens who for years had stubbornly denied reports of Nazi atrocities were forced to tour “death camps.” The horrors they saw there instantly and permanently expunged their disbelief. Similar shock treatment sometimes occurs in marriage counseling and drug addiction therapy when people are confronted with the stark reality of their aberrant or harmful behavior.

5. We feel the need to find explanations for everything, regardless of whether the explanations are accurate.

It isn’t that we humans like to have explanations for things; we must have explanations. We are an explaining species. Explanations, by making sense of an uncertain world, apparently render the circumstances of life more predictable and thus diminish our anxieties about what the future may hold. Although these explanations have not always been valid, they have enabled us through the millennia to cope with a dangerous world and to survive as a species.

The compulsion to explain everything drives our curiosity and thirst for knowledge of the world. As far as I know, Homo sapiens is the only species that seeks knowledge or evinces any awareness of the concept. Knowing—finding an explanation for an event—is one of the most satisfying of human experiences. There is great comfort in recognizing and making sense out of the world. Doing so creates order and coherence, and, where there is order, there is safety and contentment. We are instantly aware of the loss of this inner feeling of safety and contentment the moment we don’t recognize a pattern in a situation that confronts us.

Finding explanations goes along with our compulsion to see cause-and-effect relationships and other patterns. Once we identify a pattern, we generally have little trouble explaining or having someone else explain for us how it came to be and what it means. It’s an automatic, uncontrollable response that we experience constantly. We explain our actions to others and listen attentively while others explain their actions to us. We say to a friend, “Mary’s late for work today.” And the friend immediately explains, “Oh, she’s probably …” And we acknowledge the explanation: “Yeah, maybe you’re right.” News media explain current events while we assimilate the explanations like students in a classroom. Sports commentators “calling” a game explain the meaning of the plays and the teams’ competing strategies while we happily process their comments. A young man explains to his father how the family car became dented while the father eagerly but skeptically awaits a full explanation. We are an explaining species; we could justifiably have been labeled “Homo explainicus” As Gilovich says: “To live, it seems, is to explain, to justify, and to find coherence among diverse [things. It would seem the brain contains a special module]—an explanation module that can quickly and easily make sense of even the most bizarre patterns of information.”

Read the following paragraph; it’s a puzzle:

I walked to the bank. No one was there. It was Tuesday. A woman spoke to me in a foreign language. I dropped a camera and, when I stooped to pick it up, the music began. It had been a long war. But my children were safe.

Do you feel your mind struggling to make sense of these seemingly disconnected bits of information? Do you experience a subtle but nonetheless tangible frustration and discomfort as you grope to shape these bits into a recognizable pattern? But you can’t. The information is too jumbled, truncated, and disconnected. Still, something inside us tries to make sense of it, to sort it out—if you’ll pardon the expression—logically. We unconsciously grapple with the sentences looking for a connection, some common thread that will bind the information together as a whole.

If we can’t immediately perceive a connecting pattern, the mind manufactures one, either by filling in “missing” information, as happened with the six randomly placed dots, or by eliminating “unrelated” or “irrelevant” information. In something akin to desperation, we force-fit a pattern to relieve our discomfort. Edmund Bolles, in his fascinating book about human perception, A Second Way of Knowing, says, “We expect everything we perceive to mean something. When presented with an image that has no larger meaning, we find one anyway.”

Of course, the whole process of force-fitting a pattern occurs so quickly that we usually are not conscious of any discomfort. But make no mistake about it, the discomfort is there, in our mind. And if our mind is unable to come up with a satisfactory pattern after only a few seconds, the discomfort will become palpable.

This is the same discomfort we feel when we hear a dissonant chord in music. We don’t need to be told or taught that the chord is dissonant; we instinctively know it, just as we instinctively feel a combined sense of relief and pleasure when the chord resolves into a harmonious mode. That’s what the word harmony means in music: an agreeable, pleasing combination of two or more tones in a chord. Harmony (knowing) is pleasing; dissonance or disharmony (not knowing) is displeasing.

But, you don’t need to manufacture a pattern for the seemingly unrelated sentences in the puzzle paragraph above. I’m furnishing you the solution or, as Paul Harvey put it, “the rest of the story”:

The end of World War II had just been declared. I was in a little French town on my way to a bank. That Tuesday happened to be a French national holiday, so the bank was closed. A French woman, celebrating the armistice, handed me her camera and asked me to take a photograph of her and her husband. I accidentally dropped the camera, at which point the French Marseillaise began playing from a loudspeaker in the center of the town. I was touched with emotion. My two sons had fought with American forces. It had been a long war, but they were safe.

Don’t you now experience a certain mixed feeling of satisfaction, relief, and contentment in seeing how the sentences relate to one another?

Humans have to know things. Knowing is satisfying and comforting; not knowing is unsettling. Wanting to know, needing to know, is a fundamental human trait. We giggle at the reader who skips to the last pages of a mystery story to learn whodunit, but that reader, who unconsciously responded to a deep-seated instinct ingrained in our species over the millennia and whose curiosity has been sated, cares not what we think. On a grander, nobler scale, historians spend years doing in-depth research to understand —find explanations for—the course of human events. And here, in this book, I the author and you the reader are likewise looking for explanations. It is what we humans do. It is, like all those other traits, what makes us human.

Unfortunately, our compulsion to explain things can, like those other traits, get us in trouble. When presented with an event that has no particular meaning, we find one anyway, and we subconsciously don’t care whether the explanation is valid.

In March 1996, an animal house burned down at the Philadelphia zoo while two zoo guards were making personal phone calls in their office. When asked about the fire, they said they had smelled smoke near the building about two and a half hours earlier, but they thought it was coming from a nearby railyard. When confronted with a situation, they made up an explanation, were satisfied with it, and returned to their office. Twenty-three primates were killed. The two guards were fired.

In 1974, a Northwestern University professor was helping a young man try to get his manuscript published, but their efforts were rejected. The author became extremely angry. Five weeks later, an explosion rocked the campus. The professor wondered, just for a second, whether there could be a connection between the explosion and the young man’s anger, but dismissed the idea as farfetched. He was confronted with a situation, made up an explanation, was satisfied with it, and went about his business. Twenty years later he learned that the young man he had helped was Theodore J. Kaczynski, the so-called Unabomber, convicted of an eighteen-year spree of bombings that killed three people and injured twenty-three others.

Likewise, when analyzing problems, we sometimes come up with explanations that don’t represent the evidence very well, but we use them anyway and feel comfortable doing it. Again, we subconsciously don’t care whether the explanation is valid. Its validity is simply not a factor. It’s those pesky biases and mind-sets at work again.

Our indifference to the validity of our explanations is stunningly profound! It speaks volumes about the human mental process, for the astonishing, sobering, worrisome fact is that the explanations we give for things don’t have to be true to satisfy our compulsion to explain things.

Let’s pause a moment and reflect on this observation, which, in my humble opinion, presents an awesome insight into the workings of the human mind and into human behavior. Think about it. There’s an autonomous, unconscious mechanism in your mind and mine that switches to “satisfied” when we’ve finished formulating an explanation for something.

We are awakened late at night in our upstairs bedroom by a noise downstairs. We tell ourselves it’s the cat. And we roll over and go back to sleep.

And, being satisfied, we are then blithely content to move on to something else without seriously questioning our explanation. This is one of the reasons we humans don’t give sufficient consideration to alternatives. And not considering alternatives is, as I pointed out at the beginning of this book, the principal cause of faulty analysis.

6. Humans have a penchant to seek out and put stock in evidence that supports their beliefs and judgments while eschewing and devaluing evidence that does not.

Please do a quick experiment with me. Stop reading this page and direct your attention for a few seconds to the wall nearest you.

BEFORE CONTINUING, CONCENTRATE ON THE NEAREST WALL.

If you did as I requested, you immediately asked yourself, “What about the wall? What am I supposed to be looking for?” And you were right to ask that question, because I didn’t tell you what to focus on. You see, our eyes are almost always focused, always riveted on some object. But our eyes are merely an appendage, an extension of the mind. They do the mind’s bidding, and that constant bidding is to focus. When we don’t let the mind focus, it goes into a quasi state of shock, sort of a miniparalysis, which we sense through mild mixed feelings of disorientation, anxiety, and frustration. Imagine being told to look at that wall near you for thirty minutes without knowing what you’re supposed to be looking at. The very thought of it makes me shudder. In such a situation, the mind becomes discomforted and communicates that discomfort by making us nervous and impatient. We thus are prompted to think or even say aloud “What am I supposed to be looking at? What’s the point?” In other words, what’s the focus?