Can anything be more fascinating than knowing how and why we think in the way we do. There have been many illuminating books and articles on this subject by some brilliant people. The human mind is amazing, but it does have limitations (hey tell me about it) and sometimes does some surprising things.
What interests me particularly with this subject is its impact on our ability, as intelligence specialists, to produce accurate and focussed intelligence assessments.
Image courtesy of “https://www.flickr.com/photos/sohelparvezhaque/”
We have been working on two categories of biases that have been identified as having a fundamental influence on how we process information in our heads; these we call conscious biases and reflex biases. The former is known as such because, as thinking people, we know these biases exist and know that we should be countering them. Whereas the reflex biases relate to instinctive reactions of the brain to set situations.
Over the years, training in regard to equality and diversity has become much cleverer in highlighting potential issues with race, gender, sexuality, religion, disability, age and social class (conscious biases). But they have proved that we continue to discriminate, due for example to assumptions made about a person’s patriotism from knowing only their religion, or tendency towards criminality from their social class.
Image by courtesy of Honest Reporting
These forms of conscious bias go much deeper though; look how a non-fatal flood in Gloucestershire is reported in the media as opposed to a fatal one in Bangladesh. This is not only a bias created by distance, in a physical space sense, but also psychologically. It is easy to slip into the mentality of there being mindful human beings “like me”, and less mindful other human beings “not like me” whether they be in some distant place or who are simply different to me.
This can lead to strange thought processes where people “not like me”, say for example tramps, terrorists and African presidents, are seen as not possessing the same personal qualities as me. Can they love their family as much as I do? Do they feel shame, remorse and embarrassment as I do? Although clearly repugnant to victims, their families and many others, I suspect that most terrorists do love their families in exactly the same way as we do.
Similarly, the view of motivations behind actions can be skewed by conscious bias. There is a tendency to overestimate intrinsic incentives for ourselves and extrinsic incentives for others, for example I complete the work to get job satisfaction, whereas he just wants to get paid more. This demonstrates a temptation to view others’ motivations as simplistic and self-serving.
Conscious biases appear in many other guises. Databases are inherently biased as the information contained within is selective. Assessments by committee tend to be unduly influenced by those that speak early and assertively in the meeting. Whereas intelligence assessments can be deliberated swayed to deliver a particular result to meet external pressure; what does the CEO, commander or politician want to hear?
Although, we have only considered conscious biases above, it gives some idea of the potential scale of the impact of biases on intelligence work. The first step to a counter strategy is the realisation that biases present such a big problem.
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