I am racist. I judge people by the colour of their skin.
I am shallow. I judge people by different standards based on how attractive I find them.
On top of that, I am misogynistic, Islamaphobic, elitist, homophobic, ableist, hell, even antisemitic (and I’m Jewish!). Within moments of seeing or learning about a person, I form conclusions about them based on the groups they fall into.
This sets me apart from exactly no one. When tested, people regularly make snap judgements of others based on superficial characteristics, and they in turn use those judgements to make decisions. The first time I stumbled across findings like these, I bet I judged the subjects for being so judgemental. But after seeing similar themes repeat themselves over and over, I finally realized there was no good reason to exclude myself from the conclusions. And when I started paying attention, I realized just how often I made them.
To be clear, I am not on the lookout for these biases in myself because I constantly sense their presence; no, it is precisely because I don’t sense them that I am on high alert. I doubt most people think they make sexist or racist snap judgments, but the data show otherwise. And since I’m part of most people, I try to consciously acknowledge and apply these universal human truths to myself.
Hence the intro to this post. I don’t truly consider myself a racist, misogynist or bigot either. Yet those kinds of judgements can all arise within me. It took me a long time to admit that to myself, though. I didn’t want to believe my unconscious mind could constantly contradict the conscious one. I figured I was a decent person, and that meant all my thoughts were aligned along a certain axis of values.
But most everyone wants to believe they’re decent. That doesn’t mean our gut reactions will always fall in line with our deeply-held beliefs. And if we don’t learn to separate our gut reactions from our more conscious cognitive processes, they’re more likely to unduly influence our subsequent thoughts.
Nobody is immune to making snap judgements. The best we can do is work to cultivate them to fall more in line with our core values. And as we work on aligning them with our values, we can also learn to be aware of these judgements and proactively account for their existence. The best way to become aware of them is to learn about the biases research has already identified.
For example, I can’t recall a time I purposefully judged a woman more harshly because of her gender. But, knowing that even some of the most educated people in the world, men and women alike, are biased towards males, I try to take my knowledge of this bias into account when evaluating people. If I do catch myself falling into this trap, then I don’t blame myself or feel guilty for it. Instead, I acknowledge that it’s a human instinct I can’t control. What I can control, though, is my response to it.
Many people also immediately and subconsciously judge people by their race, sometimes with deadly consequences. In one experiment with thousands of subjects, a significant portion were more likely to shoot at images of unarmed black men compared to similar images of white men. That held true even if the shooter was black. I don’t believe I’ll ever be in a position where I have to choose whether to shoot someone at a moment’s notice, but I do believe that I can fall prey to the same biases as the people in that experiment.
Now, my biases might be calibrated differently than those in the experiment; I’m not necessarily more likely to see black people as a violent threat. But now that I know race is one of the factors people use to make snap judgements, I can acknowledge it likely influences my own thought processes in some way and investigate how and when that happens.
I’m not the only person who compensates for potential biases. When asked to judge people by pictures of their faces, subjects in one experiment correctly believed that they inherently judge black people more stringently on some level, and attempted to neutralize that inclination. But how cognizant were they of their biases and the neutralization process? What method did they use to do the neutralizing?
And what about other, less notorious, yet equally subversive biases? Many people are aware of implicit racial bias, but we humans have a whole host of inherent biases that can wreak havoc on our judgements and decision-making without our noticing.
Correcting for biases shouldn’t just be a reflexive process — it should be a conscious one. But it can be difficult to do the hard work of noticing and neutralizing harmful biases when just admitting to holding the biases can feel like an admission of wrongdoing. That’s why it’s important to acknowledge we can hold harmful biases without that necessarily reflecting our moral character. If we instinctively judge women or people of colour more harshly — and unfortunately, people often do, even if they are women or people of colour — then we shouldn’t assign a moral judgement to our instinctive ones.
Right now, there are millions of people who deny having racist or sexist biases because admitting so would connote moral failure. But if we accept that even the best-intentioned of us can instinctively judge others based on their race and sex, then we should try to create an environment that encourages honest evaluation and reflection of our beliefs. And when we discover unconscious biases that don’t align with our conscious beliefs (as we all will), we can engage them without shame, defensiveness, or dismissiveness and work to align them with our core values.
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I published this post because I am constantly thinking about this stuff, and it’s getting exhausting holding the same conversations with myself on repeat. I want to put my ideas into the world to continue the conversation with someone else. I also published it to subject my ideas to outside criticism. I know there are flaws and biases in my thinking, and I won’t be able to spot all of them on my own.
But those aren’t the main reasons I made this post. The main reason is that I can look back and see how discovering and learning about behavioural psychology has improved my own life, and I hope it can do the same for someone else. Now that I know more about the ways people operate, I find that I am more compassionate, empathetic, and forgiving, both with myself and others.
Where before I may have taken other people’s actions personally, now I wonder what caused their behaviour. Where before I may have judged people for holding the “wrong” opinions, now I try to discover what led them to hold those opinions in the first place. Where before I would have judged myself for holding one of these “wrong” opinions, now I try to understand the source of its arising.
I named this post Am I Reflecting because that is the question I try to ask myself whenever I need to make a novel judgement or decision. Am I reflecting on the potential biases at play, or charging blindly ahead? Am I reflecting on what actions will most likely lead to my desired result, or letting my emotions pull me in the opposite direction? Am I reflecting on how this situation could look different to people other than me, or treating my own experience as the de facto truth?
I don’t just reflect on my thoughts or actions in the moment. In fact, if I’m relying on my reflections in a tense moment, I probably won’t make an ideal decision. I tend to freeze up under pressure, and think through options painstakingly slowly. When there isn’t enough time to reflect adequately in the moment, I reflect after about how I’d like to behave next time I find myself in a similar situation. I also reflect on potential situations before they occur, reminding myself of my values and how to act in accordance with them.
In the coming posts, I hope to apply the implications of behavioural psychology, a reflective attitude, and my personal values to a range of issues. I want these posts to be the beginning of conversations, not the end — I know I don’t have all the answers, or even most of them. Let me know if you think I’m wrong about something, if an idea you read here resonates with you, or anything else you want to say. I look forward to beginning this journey with you.
