New Gaze - New World

Certainties

Day 5

As every afternoon, the camels had been unloaded, the camp set up and the white sail set. 

Aziz had shouted "Workshop!" which had brought all the trainees together. In the shadow of the sail, they were ready to receive the day's teaching. 

Sophie spoke up. She had the happy look of a mischievous child who has pulled off a good joke:"As I followed the reflections of most of you during this morning's walk, I was delighted to see how seriously you shook your certainties. I particularly liked the looks on the faces of some of you. For those of you, we can now see a certain humility on your faces.

At first sight, you realised that your most solid certainty did not stand up to investigation. During the break, you exchanged with each other and realised that you had all had the same experience although your initial certainties were different. You came to the conclusion that no certainty can withstand investigation. Now ask yourself, "If no certainty stands up to investigation, where do these certainties come from and why are they maintained? 

Part of the answer is called "cognitive biases", which distort our understanding and cause us to make poor decisions. Recognising our cognitive biases is one way to reduce their influence. I will mention the most common ones.

The first is called the Dunning-Kruger effect, also known as the overconfidence effect, which is the tendency of a poorly qualified person to believe that they are more competent than they really are. If, for example, you have had the idea of the century, wondered why no one had thought of it before and thought you were great. Then, after a good night's sleep, you realise that your idea from the night before might not have been so brilliant, you have fallen victim to the Overconfidence Bias.

The second bias is called illusory superiority, and is seen when we overestimate our abilities and qualities compared to our peers. For example, if I ask one of you gentlemen to evaluate your driving skills in relation to these ladies here, it is quite likely that your illusory superiority will lead you to consider yourself a superior driver.Sophie grinned mischievously as she looked at the sheepish men."

The third bias is the illusion of knowing, which is when we think we have the answer to a problem because it seems similar to a situation we've already encountered. An example we have all experienced is replacing your last appliance. Which of us has looked for the same functionality on the remote control or buttons as the previous appliance instead of reading the instructions carefully? 

I see embarrassed smiles...

I can also tell you about the zero-sum bias when looking for a win-lose solution instead of a win-win. For example, it is quite common to criticise someone who has done better than us. If it were in our power, we would make sure that he or she did not have that success. Because implicitly we think that it is their success that explains our condition when in fact it is not. Ladies, admit that if Cindy Crawford, Linda Evangelista, or Naomi Campbell weren't Top Models, it wouldn't make you any prettier. Gentlemen, admit that if Bill Gates or Warren Buffet were not billionaires, you would not be any richer for it.

The fifth bias is the hypothesis confirmation bias. It occurs when we only look for evidence that confirms what we think, at the risk of no longer noticing what contradicts our certainty. This is the case, for example, when you rely on four cold days in May to question all the scientific studies that point to human-induced global warming.

The sixth bias is called the fundamental attribution error. This is blaming others for their mistakes, and external causes for their successes. Think about that person who passes you in the queue, your first reaction may be to be angry, to think that he or she is disrespectful. But he may never cut the line, and may only do so this time because he is going to miss his flight, the one he has to take to see his mother in hospital.

A seventh bias is the availability heuristic, where we reason only on information that is immediately available to us and therefore incomplete. This situation is often encountered in emergency situations where we make a hasty decision without taking the whole context into account. This is the example of a person in a burning building who tries to go down a smoke-filled staircase instead of protecting himself and waiting for help in a sealed flat.Self-indulgence bias occurs when we take responsibility for our successes but never for our failures.Who among us has not justified getting a good annual evaluation by the quality of his work, or getting a bad evaluation by the severity or incompetence of his superior or teacher?The ninth bias is the blowback effect. This is our tendency to defend our beliefs when they are questioned by someone else.A study has shown that if we are right 90% of the time, our overconfidence will cause us to argue that we are also right in the 10% of cases where our error is obvious to everyone.Finally, the tenth bias is that of the blind task, i.e. seeing cognitive biases in others but not in oneself.Several studies show that more than 85% of us feel less biased than others. What about you?To illustrate this, notice how easy it is to spot biases in our neighbour. We often forget to turn the observation on ourselves, and when we do, it is always with much more complacency.The tools "Presence", "Intuition", "Tenth Man" and "I don't know", that is, half of the tools we teach, are mainly aimed at avoiding falling into the traps set by our cognitive biases.I will end this teaching with a quote from Aristotle the wise man who said: "The ignorant asserts, the learned doubts, the wise reflects."