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- Herausgeber: Tracey McDonald Publishers
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
When it comes to making great decisions, the way you think about things is usually a lot more influential than what you actually think. If you ever hired a person who 'looks the part', dated someone who 'gives you a good feeling', voted for the party that 'speaks the most sense' or got into an investment that 'cannot be missed', only to realise you made a horrible mistake, you might have wondered how you ever talked yourself into it. Yet, still bearing the bruises, you're likely to make exactly the same decision the next time. The beliefs that guide your ideas and the instincts that drive your actions, are all informed by your unconscious biases, and literally every single one of us has them, which irrationally tell us one thing is good and another is bad, one thing is absolutely true and another is utterly false, and make you act less smartly than you should. But the good news is that you can learn to see them, to manage them and ultimately overcome them. In Don't Believe Everything You Think, Colin J Browne shows you how biases work, why they matter, and how to reframe your thinking to make well-founded decisions about life and work, relationships and investing, and much else in between, to vastly improve your chances of success.
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Seitenzahl: 188
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
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DON’T BELIEVE EVERYTHING YOU THINK
How to stop making decisions that let you down, lead you astray and keep you from success
Colin J Browne
CONTENTS
First published by Tracey McDonald Publishers, 2022
Suite No. 53, Private Bag X903, Bryanston, South Africa, 2021
www.traceymcdonaldpublishers.com
Copyright © Colin J Browne, 2022
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission from the publisher.
ISBN 978-1-998958-55-9
e-ISBN 978-1-998958-56-6
Text design and typesetting by Patricia Crain, Empressa
Cover design by Tomangopawpadilla
Digital conversion by Wouter Reinders
To Linda, Gabriella, Simone and Emilie.
You fill me with purpose, you inspire me to always try harder and you make my life beautiful.
I cherish every breath you take and every second you live.
Eternal Chudders.
xxxxx
INTRODUCTION
I liked Barack Obama. I still do.
There are many people in the world who would say that’s all they need to know about me.
That’s how this works.
From that one piece of information, they may infer any number of things, good or bad, about what else I like, how I think, what I do with my time, what kind of friends I have (and how they think), and my stance on pretty much any political, social or economic issue that comes to mind.
If you took the time to ask me about those things however, rather than allowing assumptions to influence your brain, you’d discover we don’t have to agree on a now retired statesman to have lots and lots of things in common.
That’s how this is supposed to work.
This book is about that.
WHAT THIS IS (AND WHAT IT ISN’T)
I think it’s worth positioning this, because I fear it could otherwise be misconstrued. This book both is, and is not, about psychology.
Broadly, the study of unconscious bias is one for trained psychologists, and I’m not one of those. What I am is a business owner who believes it’s worthwhile making a complex topic such as this accessible to other people like me, so that we can all do something about it.
As a result, you’ll find no deep analysis of unconscious biases and their micro-variances. This is a top-level exploration of the most common ways in which our minds take shortcuts, what it looks like when they do, and how we can deal with it all.
If the taste for further reading has hooked you, a Google search will lead you to an endless mix of research papers, some of which are wonderfully compelling and others that are as dry as dust. That’s for you to decide, but it was my decision, going into this project, that if you have avoided taking a course in human psychology for this long, you’re unlikely to start now so it’s worth keeping it simple.
There’s no scientific jargon here, and just to be clear, I have even conflated some ideas entirely on purpose, to cut through the clutter. I’m confident you’ll get both the big idea and some of the finer details with each chapter, and as you move through the book, you’ll be able to build up a worthwhile toolbox of actionable insights.
Finally, this is a book of stories. We all have our stories and it is my hope that as you read the ones contained in this book, you’ll relate to their messages in a personal way.
That’s one of the points I most wanted to make here. Your unconscious biases (and I flat out guarantee without even the tiniest fear of challenge, that you are absolutely crammed to the gills with them) and the ways in which other people’s biases have been applied to you (I guarantee this has happened to you too) ensure you have something fundamental in common with Diego Maradona, Marilyn Manson, Serena Williams, Joan Didion, Andy Murray, Vladimir Putin, Michael Schumacher, Idi Amin, Amy Winehouse, and me. You’re in our group already, along with the rest of the human race. You’re about to find out how knee-deep you are.
Preferences versus biases
Whenever I get the chance to order a pizza of my own, I always go for something that my local place calls a Siciliana. It’s a salt fest of anchovies, capers and olives, and I think they put peperoni in there somewhere too, but I’m usually too dehydrated by the second slice to care. It’s probably a bad idea, but I love it.
I don’t get one nearly as often as I’d like, however, because my daughters like their pizza with ham and pineapple, and since they’re young and we spend an inordinate amount of time at the kind of family restaurant where kids can make their own, and because they like making them more than eating them, and because I hate waste, I tend to eat more of their kind of pizza than I do of my own. It’s not my thing, the Hawaiian, but it’s fine.
But at the risk of saying something really blindingly obvious, the only reason I prefer a Siciliana to a Hawaiian, is because I’ve tried them both and I am able to make the comparison. This is important, so make a note of that.
And while I’m talking about food (I hope you’re not stuck somewhere you can’t get a bite to eat right about now, because this could get tricky for you), I like Indian food too. I love a butter chicken. And I like Thai food (crab curry!) and Mozambican food (peri-peri chicken might be my taste buds’ ultimate sweet-talking Mac Daddy). I know this, because I have tried all of these.
Preferences are the product of exploration. The more you experience, the more you’re able to hone them. It’s a process of discernment. That you have them at all may be a sign of your open-mindedness.
Since no two of us are exactly alike, and since this is as subjective as it gets, it is perfectly plausible that even a group of the very closest of friends, seated at a table in the same restaurant, with the same menus, could each order something totally different and not think anything of it at all.
Preferences are pretty easy to grasp. Biases on the other hand usually need a bit of a closer look.
I was content to take chicken and wors off the braai and curious enough about crocodile to add it to my plate one evening, at an outdoor dinner at a lodge in Botswana with a client.
There was one thing I simply turned down however, even at the risk of offending my dinner companions. This thing is high in protein (three times as much as beef, apparently), has zero cholesterol, and according to many that night, was absolutely delicious, which sounds absolutely like something I would love.
But it turns out, I just can’t bring myself to eat worms. Or to be fair, caterpillars, which the delicacy of mopane worms more accurately are.
My preference of chicken over caterpillars is not a matter of preference, because I have never tried mopane worms and therefore cannot know. What it is, is a bias.
Something seems strange so I have pushed it away. Something seems unpleasant, so I experience a kind of revulsion for it. All of these are feelings based on no useful information at all, because I literally don’t have any.
Mind you, I do know someone worse than me … an elderly Greek man whose biases almost led him to starve to death while on a business trip to Tokyo a couple of decades ago.
To be fair to him, even he enjoys a fairly varied diet of what might be called Western food, but the intense strangeness of Japan when looking at it from an outsider’s perspective led him to believe that even a visit to McDonald’s would be too much out of left field.
So he didn’t eat.
At all.
For four days.
Then, mercifully, on day four, he found a Greek restaurant down a Tokyo side street, which crucially, was run by an authentic Greek man.
It realistically might have saved his life.
This again is not a preference, but a bias. His untested, anecdotal distrust of Japanese food meant he didn’t even attempt to find out if there was anything there he might enjoy.
For him, mopane worms applied to an entire national cuisine.
You see the difference between a preference and a bias, right? Easy peasy, I think.
And, of course, it can be applied very broadly.
I have an absolute conviction that The Joshua Tree was the best U2 album of them all, and that upon its release, U2 spectacularly peaked. My wife feels the same about Zooropa, an album I dislike so intensely, it finally switched me off U2 forever in 1993.
I can’t hear what she hears in it, but there would have to be something terribly wrong with our relationship if that mattered. It’s also relevant that she is more than a decade younger than me, so those albums appeared in our lives at critical, formative times.
You have to learn these things though.
As a teen of the eighties, I was very into what I consider to be the music of the era. Yet as I entered my 30s and friends my age started to throw eighties parties, it dawned on me that I had heard the decade totally differently to almost all of them. Sure I liked a bit of Whitney, a bit of Wham, a bit of Bananarama … but if I put together an eighties playlist it would be much heavier on tracks from the likes of Japan (the band, this time), Bauhaus, Joy Division, The Cure, Fischer-Z and A Flock of Seagulls, and U2 would likely make an appearance (up until The Joshua Tree, after which, pffft). This is the stuff that to me was the complex textural overlay of what to many others was a decade of easy pop.
For years, I thought our differences proved that I had more depth and a superior ear for musical innovation that the masses couldn’t hear. It was flawed logic, but there’s nothing quite so heady, however limiting, as a self-made pedestal.
I accept now that the reasons the bands I liked never made any money is because nobody bought their records and conversely, the reasons the bands that get played at eighties parties get the airtime they do, is because they made millions of people very happy at the time, and clearly still do.
I had to set my bias aside to accept that it is just a matter of preference.
It’s natural to have preferences. You’re not curious enough if you haven’t formed any. As you grow, you’ll experience new things and your preferences will certainly change. Preferences are beautifully fluid.
As you go through this book, you’ll begin to see very clearly that biases are also natural however, but not nearly so pretty; not nearly so fluid. And not nearly so easily changed without some attention and hard work. We must try where we can to change them, and where we cannot, we must at least have the courage to call them what they are.
Unconscious versus Conscious Biases
There’s one more thing that’s worth understanding: the difference between unconscious and conscious biases.
There’s a clear difference between knowing you’re doing something intentionally and not knowing you’re doing it at all. There’s an expert on facial expressions at the San Francisco School of Medicine named Paul Ekman who has advised police departments and anti-terrorism groups by identifying the subtle nuances that flash across the faces of human beings, even if only for a split second, when they’re not telling the truth. The faintest hint of a smirk when they talk about how devastated they were to discover their murdered family, or the slight flick of the eyes up and to the left, when they describe their made up alibi.
Among Ekman’s roles was that of scientific consultant on the television series Lie to Me, which was based on his work and starred Tim Roth as a stylised version of him.
Of course in the instance of lying murderers, who know full well they are making stuff up, there are aspects of both conscious and unconscious behaviour. The lies are deliberate, but they just can’t help but give themselves away with their reactions to their own lies.
It’s possible to draw a comparison here when it comes to conscious and unconscious biases. A conscious bias is one you know you have and choose to act upon intentionally. Consider not eating mopane worms, or refusing to eat anything Japanese, and what you’re seeing is a conscious bias.
An unconscious bias is an attitude that operates outside your awareness and control and which you may not even be aware of. The figurative smirk or flick of the eyes that you don’t even know you’re doing.
Like when you lock your car doors upon entering a ‘bad’ neighbourhood. No considered thought goes into such a reaction. It’s instinctive.
In this book, we’ll be looking at unconscious biases for the most part, because they have the propensity to be damaging, limiting and counterproductive in ways that you ought to know, so you can see them and deal with them.
That’s the journey I am going to take you on through this book and I promise you it will be worth it. I’m ready whenever you are. Shall we?
Colin
CHAPTER ONE
Appearance Bias: We judge books by their covers
Judging a book by its cover
You may never have heard of Joan Didion. I might never have done so either if I hadn’t pulled The White Album off a Flamingo carousel while buying books by their covers in a bookshop sometime in the early nineties. That discovery started a love affair, not because of what she said and did, but the way she said it. One hell of a writer. One hell of a journalist too. It was the journalism that really did it for me, and a few years later I went on to become what was probably no more than around ten per cent of the journalist she was, which was something of an achievement, in retrospect.
I am not Joan Didion, and not just because of the chasmic talent differential between us, but because I’m male, around six foot (I think more, but I suppose so do we all), and because I like to make people laugh. That makes me a little on the loud side, which is great when I’m vying for attention, but sucks exceedingly badly when I am trying not to be seen.
Didion understood the power of not being seen. In her book Slouching Towards Bethlehem she famously made one of her most quoted observations:
My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests. And it always does. That is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out.
You have to see her in her heyday, to know what she’s talking about. There are plenty of pictures and if you want to shortcut the investigative process, Google Joan Didion Corvette and you’ll get the idea. Do it now quickly. We both know you’ve got your phone on you.
I think the picture is iconic, but if you look at it with care, what you see is indeed a physically little person, arms folded uncomfortably, a lit cigarette (always the lit cigarette), hair a bit dishevelled and a look on her face that may be a little bored, maybe a little sad, but was possibly just her resting face.
It was that which people saw, because it was that which was so apparent. All of that, I mean, likely including the cigarette since she reigned largest during the sixties and seventies and you could basically spark up while performing open heart surgery in those days.
That this little person with the uncomfortable demeanor had one of the most razor sharp and intuitive minds in journalism was lost on people, and that often turned out to be a mistake.
As a journalist working a business beat in Dubai later in the nineties, I had read Didion, but apparently learned nothing because I never managed to get the sort of unguarded access she got. To put it plainly, nobody ever forgot I was there, or made the assumption it was safe to say whatever it was that came into their minds when I was in the room.
They did with her. Frequently.
In truth, despite what she says, it was only one tiny ingredient in the recipe that made her brilliant, but Appearance Bias played into her hands: Small, quiet, moody, soft-spoken. How can she possibly be a threat?
But while Didion got the best of shady California politicians and counterculture leaders, Josephine Baker managed to pull the wool over the eyes of hands-down the most suspicious people on the planet in their day.
You may never have heard of her either, but Google her and you’ll be up to speed in no time. Again, I’m happy to wait.
Hidden in broad daylight
Baker was an African American exotic dancer and movie star whose fame began when she moved to France in the 1920s. She would have been legendary enough even if only for her raw talent, because audiences loved her; she was massively celebrated and clubs such as the famous Folies Bergère had her to thank for plenty of their own fame and success.
Which is probably why the Nazis never picked up on the fact that she was an incredibly effective enemy spy throughout their occupation of France during World War Two.
For years, Baker moved freely across the borders between occupied France and neutral Spain. She went to Portugal and North Africa. She had a rare amount of freedom of movement because she was a big deal, and because in daily life, away from the active war fronts, there was still demand for her to perform.
She was a star. Someone who once set the world’s press off on a frenzy of awe by wearing only a skimpy short skirt made of bananas, and a necklace while she performed one of her acts on stage.
You don’t tend to think of someone like that, beyond her persona, and that was the Nazis’ mistake.
Spies hide in the shadows, trying not to be seen, they don’t pose and smile for the cameras.
Spies try to sneak across borders by night, they don’t climb out of an ultramarine blue Packard Roadster with glossy lipstick and a feather boa.
The border booms lifted for her and she went right on through and nobody ever even considered that she might have secret information pinned to the inside of her underwear describing the locations of German airfields, garrisons and fuel depots.
Josephine Baker couldn’t have been more different to Joan Didion, yet they had something important in common. People looked at them and made assumptions about who they were and whether they posed a threat, based only on their appearance.
There are countless stories like this. You might have one of your own. If you have never had the experience of someone drawing a completely wrong assumption about you based on how you look, dress or sound, or perhaps based on the car you drive or the school you went to, or any number of vaguely relevant pieces of information, all I can say is, you won’t be spared forever. It’s one of the things people can be counted upon to do.
Never trust a guy in an orange shirt
Harry Markopolos is another of those people you probably haven’t heard of, but really should know about. This guy’s story is genuinely insane. You know what I’m going to ask you to do before I get into it though, right? Google his name, click images and I promise you, they’ll tell you a story straight away. Because the way he looks, is the story. Or at least, it’s a good portion of it.
Let’s talk about another fellow first. You may be more familiar with the name Bernie Madoff. In 2008, he was arrested for fraud and a year later sentenced to 150 years in prison (not a typo). His crime was running a classic Ponzi scheme, based on false promises to investors, thousands of whom ultimately ended up bankrupt, while the $65 billion (also not a typo) he collected from them went missing from their accounts.
It sucks to be them, but you know what they say: if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s probably a duck. If anyone offers you investment returns that look too good to be true, they probably are.
To be fair though, Madoff didn’t walk like a duck. He walked like a god with his $8 000 suit and his $200 000 watch and his long chauffeur driven cars with windows tinted as black as his soul.
Though many of the leaders on Wall Street were sure he was pulling a fast one, and none of the major Wall Street firms invested with him, nobody picked up a phone and called it in, apparently because nobody really cared all that much.
Except for one person. Let’s get back to Harry Markopolos because he’s been waiting patiently for about five paragraphs now, and history has shown that keeping him waiting is a genuinely bad idea.
In 1999, Markopolos was a portfolio analyst (code for a smart numbers guy) at an investment firm, when he was asked by his boss to take a look at what was happening at a hedge fund which was consistently delivering returns of 1% to 2% per month, come rain or shine. Find out what it’s all about, they said, and tell us how we can do something like that too.
When Markopolos got Madoff’s financials, he said he knew within five minutes that something was up, and within four hours, knew it could only have been fraud.
In 2000, he blew the whistle, calling the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and even providing supporting documents. That’s the team that is supposed to police and prevent financial fraud, in case you’re not certain.
Then he did it again in 2001.
