You are running hard in a race. From third place, you pass the person in second place, so now you are in first place.

This issue is about bias. Bias is a term we normally associate with ill deeds and try to avoid, but I am going to start this article with another way of looking at bias. Ultimately all cognition is bias. Anytime we encounter new information, make a decision, or engage in an action, we bring up mental models to give meaning to what we perceive and use the affordances and emotional valances in those models to steer our reaction. Those built-in models are based on a lifetime of experiences. They are the “truth” of us, whether prejudiced, demeaning, leaning one way or another, or not. If X happens, there are only so many ways I can interpret it or act in response, and past experience tells me these one or two choices are probably the best. Bias merely represents our brain’s fundamental way of deciding. (To read the research on this perspective, look at the Harvard Bundle on Bias and Heuristics)

Since we assume our past experiences with the world represent the most likely future experiences, we build models of meaning from previous experiences that allow us to understand future experiences. To understand, we stereotype. At the basic level, prejudice, stereotyping, and bias are not tendencies we must get rid of, or even can get rid of. They navigate us through a complex and difficult world, especially the social one. We just need to fine-tune them.

Unfortunately, we err. We try to be “logical,” “objective,” or “smart” in our decision-making, and yet these descriptors really just reflect the values of the larger group, not some greater truth; in other words, they represent the collective bias of a culture. I might rage at a waiter because something in my own experiences has deemed that raging^[1] is the best thing to do, but in others’ eyes, that might be unfair. Which bias should I adhere to? The collective bias or my own? Not easy as I have discovered in a recent personal incident explained in this footnote.^[2]

This is not to say that that the personal bias is equal to the collective. Were it so, we wouldn’t need laws, treaties, or religions. And in the case above, the group knows better than I do that the probable harm caused to me or to the waiter exceeds the probable gain. My biases are usually hammered together in minutes, but the collective bias of any group is deep, and centuries old (though their age can be a problem too). To upgrade my own biases, I turn to literature, media, research, others’ expertise, and careful thinking. Feeding on this collective decision-making ability to gain skills is the transit from child to adult, ignorant to educated, and we spend more brain hours on this endeavor than anything else. Think about it. Watching TV, surfing the net, playing games, reading novels, computing, talking to others are all attempts to feast on the collective knowledge and improve our decision-making.

^[1] New finding in neuroscience: aggression is deliberate, not a loss of self-control.

^[2] I am facing such a dilemma now. A close friend is a bit large and I think this has been troubling her for most of her life. A few years ago, she was diagnosed with uterine cancer, which fortunately, surgery took care of. But, before that, just after the doctor told her she had cancer, he also told her that this illness was common is overweight women. She told us, in a rather heated way, that she was being “fat shamed.” I told her back, in rather strong terms, that I thought she was overreacting: The doctor was just doing his job. But she is still adamant that he was insensitive—to the point of cruelty—by putting that information forward just after giving the upsetting news of cancer.
  I thought her anger and wording showed a terrible bias in her thinking, but now I wonder about my own. What bias of my own made me shut her down so quickly instead of listening? I should have followed the advice my psychologist-friend Gerry Yokota gave on a similar issue: When a person is in pain, it is real, no matter how they construct the cause, so focus on the pain. Indeed, biases are like an onion, with so many layers. If you have some thoughts on this, mail me.