Confirmation Bias and Racism

When I hear the word bias, I think of either news organizations that slant their coverage to favor one political position over another or racial prejudice.

I learned about cognitive bias in my psychology courses in college —the collection of faulty ways of thinking that is apparently hardwired into the human brain. The collection is large. Wikipedia’s “List of cognitive biases” contains 185 entries, that is a significant amount!

Some of the biases are not a big deal at all, like the Ikea effect, for instance, which is defined as “the tendency for people to place a disproportionately high value on objects that they partially assembled themselves.” I know this one all too well.

But If I had to single out a particular bias as the most pervasive and damaging, it would probably be confirmation bias. That’s the effect that leads us to look for evidence confirming what we already think or suspect, to view facts and ideas we encounter as further confirmation, and to discount or ignore any piece of evidence that seems to support an alternate view. Confirmation bias shows up most blatantly in our current political divide, where each side seems unable to allow that the other side is right about anything.

Because biases appear to be so hardwired and unalterable, most of the attention paid to countering them hasn’t dealt with the problematic thoughts, judgments, or predictions themselves. Instead, it has been devoted to changing behavior.

But I’m learning, as a coach, that in order to change the hardwiring default programming, we have to get to the root of things, which is what Thought work does. I teach thought work as the foundational tool in my coaching practice, because it is where clients gain leverage over their cognitive biases.

Since Confirmation bias—probably the most pervasive and damaging bias of them all—leads us to look for evidence that confirms what we already think, and is hard wired into the human brain, do we even stand a chance at overcoming racism?

 I’m hopeful and skeptical, but mostly hopeful, since I witness the power of being a watcher of my own thoughts, and the power of consciously choosing whether to believe my thoughts or not.  

The brain does this confirmation bias thing in almost everything we think; sometimes consciously, most often, unconsciously.

And then, to make things even more tricky to untangle, add the fact that Humans don’t like to be wrong. We have egos. And that’s where all of this can get super messy.

In order to change, we have to open up to the possibility that we are wrong. It is painful to open up to, and it takes a lot of courage and humility.

I’m wrong about the Thought I’ve had that I’m not a racist.

Here’s where I’ve questioned everything these last few weeks and had my eyes opened:

• The Black Lives Matter movement is minimizing that All Lives Matter. No. That’s not what the movement is saying at all. I’ve been humbled in what I thought I knew about that.
• America has made so much progress. Yes, and No. When I tell myself that we’ve made progress, I don’t look for evidence of where we’re still missing it and I need to open my eyes to what is still going on.
• Because I’m sad, that is enough. Yes, and No. I need to do more than feel sad. I need to open up to how I can make a difference in tangible ways.
• This is an all or nothing endeavor: Either I become a social justice warrior, or I don’t say anything at all. No. I’m wrong about that too. I can decide what my contribution will look like each new day.

The brain likes to delegate using energy and run on efficiency mode; meaning it likes to operate on auto pilot. To ask it to generate courage, to think new thoughts, to be willing to be wrong,  is asking a lot, and most of us shut down before we see the process through.

Consciousness-raising is an awakening process I do purposefully in my Thought work and teach to all of my clients.

I am becoming a better watcher of my Thoughts with lots of practice.

I see ‘This is what I’m Thinking,’ and I start to see my Thoughts as neutral, they aren’t ME, they’re just Thoughts.

The concept is easy, but it’s not easy to do. 

Change occurs when we can drop our defenses and lower our resistance to holding onto what we think we know.

Here’s the only thing I know: I don’t know what it would be like to be Black in America. And I never will. But as our Black citizens in our country seek to raise our consciousness about what they are feeling, I want to be influenced by their stories and moved in my emotion.

I don’t want to shut this down.

This is how we get to the core beliefs and start to create a new, national persona.

When our consciousness has been raised, we are then able to start imagining new possibilities, what life will be like when freed from the problematic Thoughts of confirmation bias, or in our current national circumstances, racism.

We will all have racist Thoughts. Most of us are unaware of them. They run on default through programming that occurred implicitly and explicitly. Our racist Thoughts will show up due to how the brain is programmed toward cognitive bias, specifically, confirmation bias.

The question is, what do we do with a racist Thought? Do we attach to it and believe the Thought as truth? Or can we see our Thought as just a sentence our brain is offering up, and let the Thought go – dissolve – that is our work. And it will take a lifetime to master.

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