No immunity, sorry!
Let’s continue from where we left in our last post. This is not a sequel but it would help if you read the previous one before you continue.
There is another bias that inflicts us with error of judgment and afflicts us with unforced errors – the Diagnosis Bias. This refers to our propensity to label people, ideas or things based on our initial opinions of them – and our inability to reconsider those judgments once we have made them.
If you think you don’t have this bias, may I share some bad news. None of us is immune to falling into this trap. In a manner of speaking, that’s the good news too!
How susceptible we are to diagnostic bias?
Extremely, enormously, immensely and immeasurably. So much so that even a single, seemingly innocuous word has the power to change our opinions. Need proof?
Let me share an experiment conducted in the Economics class at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Students of the class were told their regular professor was not going to come that day and that a substitute instructor would be filling in. This man was someone the students had never met before.
As is customary in American colleges, the students were given a write-up describing the instructor. There was one catch. No, make it two. Two different write-ups were handed out to the students. Only that the students didn’t know it and thought all of them were reading the same write-up.
One group of students got the following write-up.
The substitute instructor is an economics graduate student at MIT. He has had three semesters of teaching experience in psychology at another college. This is his first semester teaching Economics.
He is 26 years old and married.
People who know him consider him to be a very warm person, industrious, critical, practical and determined.
The second half received a nearly identical write-up.
The substitute instructor is an economics graduate student at MIT. He has had three semesters of teaching experience in psychology at another college. This is his first semester teaching Economics.
He is 26 years old and married.
People who know him consider him to be a rather cold person, industrious, critical, practical and determined.
Both the write-ups sound the same, right?
Wrong. Two words were different. ‘very warm’ versus ‘rather cold’.
The instructor came, taught and left. The students were then handed a feedback form. They filled them and left.
When the results were tabulated, the researchers couldn’t believe that the feedback from both groups of students were for the same instructor. The feedback from the two groups looked like black & white. Chalk and cheese. BJP and Congress. You would have thought the students were responding to two different instructors!
Students in the group that had received the write-up describing the instructor as ‘warm’, loved him. They described him as good natured, considerate of others, informal, sociable, popular, humourous and humane.
The second group, who sat in the same class and listened to the same man and the same lecture, didn’t like him much. They saw him as ‘self-centred, formal, unsociable, unpopular, irritable, humourless and ruthless.
Why this kolaveri?
When we hear a description of someone, no matter how brief, it inevitably shapes our experience of that person!
Psychologist Franz Epting, an expert in understanding how people construct meaning in their experiences, says all of us put on diagnostic glasses when we encounter new people. When we meet someone, we quickly diagnose him or her before deciding whether we want to engage in a conversation with him or her.
Epting says, ‘the baggage that comes with labeling is the notion of the blinders, really. It prevents you from seeing what’s clearly before your face. All you are seeing now is the label.’
The contrasting feedback from the students was caused by one word used to describe the instructor – ‘warm’ versus ‘cold’. Interestingly, the word is completely irrelevant in the whole scheme of things. His qualification, experience and teaching should have defined him. Instead, the students’ perception of him was fashioned by a word unconnected to any of it.
Imagine the impact of this bias in the context of advertising that we see. In the context of product write-ups that we read. In the interviews we conduct based on what we read in the CV.
Do you still think you are immune!
