Apparently yesterday’s (by an hour) post was more personal than I was quite ready for…
Let’s detox with something less personal!
Counterbalancing a Tiny Bit of Our Biases
An Unofficial Crash Course in Cognitive Science for Writers: Pt. 1
Have you ever reflected on a memory, and brought it up with a family member or friend who was there, only to find that they remembered it very differently?
Some of this has to do with how the brain stores and rewrites memories; some of this has to do with perspective and past experience. But it also has to do with a word I secretly hate using: bias.
We all are biased. Maybe that bias isn’t necessarily fixed for extended periods time, but at any point, our brains can only be in one state. As a general rule, I find it helpful to think of it this way: we’re made up of all our biological predispositions plus the heavily weighted events that steered us through our development, plus every millisecond of experiences since then.
Personally, it’s a little overwhelming if I dwell on it.
My father always said, there is no wasted time. In the world of neuroscience, this is true. Every thing we do or don’t do, everything we say or don’t say, everything we think or don’t think is part of the process that creates paths in our minds. For instance, if we “hate watch” things, or read articles that make us angry and worse, subsequently dwell on these things, we can end up reinforcing those anger-inducing pathways. We can end up forming a sort of pseudoidentity around something that, ostensibly, we would have been happier if we could have dismissed from the start. Love and hate use the same circuitry in the brain, after all, though hate apparently retains a semblance of rationality.
When I was learning the flute, my teacher used to talk about the “erosion” of mistakes. For every time I made a mistake, she would say, I had to play that part correctly twenty times to counterbalance the mistake. Any less, she said, and the mistake would take root in my fingers, and I would be doomed to make it again.
As I started studying cognitive science, I felt a growing marvel at the wisdom of my flute teacher. Because, we learned, while science in the past was determined to map the brain by finding the specializations of certain locations, that’s not quite how it works. Some parts of the brain are specialized, yes, but by and large, brain “mapping” is about networks. And habits—not just patterns of how we act, but the thought patterns underlying them—are networks that become engrained in our brains. Not only are they hard to break; even once we do break them, it’s incredibly easy to set off that neuronal pathway again.
Those thought habits? They’re part of what create biases.
If your first thought is that you can control your mind, adjusting for every unwelcome stray thought the same way my flute teacher taught me to adjust for mistakes—sure, by all means, if you can do that. I can’t do that, but I’m not foolish enough to believe that no one can.
For me, I had to embrace radical self-acceptance. Learning not to blame myself for anything: learning to observe, and adjust my behavior. Accepting that not everything is in my control, even in the confines of my own mind; that sometimes, I’m an asshole and that’s okay. It was radical self-acceptance that is teaching me to see my own biases and thought-habits more clearly, and—slowly, but surely—adjust them, where I want to.
Racial Bias
Since we’re talking about writing, we have to talk about some form of bias. I have to admit, I don’t usually talk about “race”-based bias, because in my experience, “racism” is too narrow, and gives a pass to a lot of similar thought patterns that would be covered if I only chose the umbrella of “tribalism”. So I do that. But that doesn’t mean that I discount racial bias—it just means that it’s one of many types of bias that I try to be aware of.
For the purposes of this post—recognizing and correcting our own biases—it must be largely irrelevant what other people are doing. The only extent to which other people’s biases matter, in this context, is how they affect us: if someone else’s tribalism is making us more tribal, for example.
But if we’re talking about studies, “tribalism” is too broad: it can be seen in nationalism, ethnocentrism, and so many other types of “ism”s. I’m opting to talk about race, here, because there is plenty of research on the subject. So, if you’re wondering if you might be racially biased, you could try taking this test. (If you want to take it, then for the sake of doing so without hearing about my experience, please take it before reading the next paragraph.)
To be honest, I’m somewhat suspicious of this test, since I felt like I knew exactly what the test was looking for, and therefore had the power to control it. I messed up on a single image the first time I took it, and that resulted in it giving me the result that I was biased; surprised that it would yield that result after a sample size of 1, I tried taking it a second time, messing up in the same way once, but then also messing up in the opposite way once. It told me that I was unbiased, that time. I admit to being slightly annoyed at that, since I could easily have made that “correction” the first time—I felt like it was a coin’s toss whether I chose to let the mistake go or try to “correct” it.
But at the end of the day, only this truth matters: race is just a social construct. Scientific research has even offered cause to question the validity of medical profiling of people by race.
Now, what this means for a member of society is very different from what this means for a writer.
As members of society, it means we must make an active effort to move past any sort of bias—which brings us back to having to recognize and counterbalance our own biases. Here, I don’t have that much advice to offer, except to read some cognitive science studies on bias and wonder how it might apply to various aspects of my life.
A personal example… For me, this involves going into the dark corners of my mind that I’d really rather leave untouched, and trying to recognize whenever I’m developing a bias; engaging in conversations that make me feel uncomfortable and upset with people who I feel don’t care about my perspective, and trying to understand theirs anyway. To me, it means leaving any preconceptions about who is worth talking with and listening to behind—trying to find a way to connect with people that I might otherwise shut out.
A scientific example… There was a study conducted in which participants would wear gloves, causing their skin to appear a different color than it was; and this showed that participants were more likely to show empathy for someone with a different skin color afterwards. This article provides an excellent rundown of the study and the background.
But as writers, our challenge is a slightly different one. Because while at our core, we may be the same, our experiences are often different. A person used to being treated fairly may not see or believe another person’s story of unfairness in the same setting, for example—a pattern all too common on the news.
An optional writing exercise
Look back on one of your experiences of an event, person and/or place you have lived through—preferably a mundane one that you have only ever considered from your own perspective. Reflect on other, very different experiences that people might have had. Perhaps this involves asking siblings or friends or relatives about their perspective of this event, person or place. Notice the differences from your own memories. Try writing a short story about that event, from someone else’s perspective—real or fictional. Then, after you’ve written it from the other person’s perspective, write it from your own.
An optional reflection: Has your perspective of your own experience changed?
(Just a note: there are no right or wrong answers, here. It’s just an exercise.)
To be continued…
I think. If anyone found this helpful and wants more, please let me know in the comments or an email or a message through the site’s contact form.
Here are some resources that I think are extremely helpful in understanding how the mind doesn’t necessarily work in the way that we might expect.
This book is about subconscious decision-making, and how we often end up rationalizing decisions that our brains have made for reasons unknown to us.
Blink by Malcolm Gladwell
The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (and Other Clinical Tales) by Oliver Sacks
Phantoms in the Brain by V. S. Ramachandran