314. Biases At Work – How We React To Others And Groups (Refreshed Episode)

Welcome to episode 314 of the Brainy.

Business Understanding the Psychology of why People.

Buy Today's episode is all about our biases toward others, including groups.

Ready? Let's get started.

You are listening to the Brainy Business Podcast where we dig into the psychology of why people buy and help you incorporate behavioral economics into your business, making it more brain friendly. Now here's your host, Melina Palmer.

Hello.

Hello everyone.

My name is Melina Palmer and I want to welcome you to the Brainy Business Podcast.

Today's episode is all about our biases.

Toward others, including groups. When it first aired, this episode was part of an eight part series I did back in the first half of 2019 called all the Biases. In It, I broke down several hundred different biases, heuristics and concepts from behavioral science and grouped them into categories that I thought made sense for the audience of the Brainy Business.

It included the way we think about.

Ourselves in personal biases, which kicked everything off and also talked about our lazy brain biases, one about how we love novelty and stories, another called Math is Hard that has some crossover with those lazy brains, of course, one on memory biases, another on present versus future biases, one on selective attention, and of course this one on other people, including groups. And don't worry, all those episodes are linked for you in the show Notes for this episode so you can check them out and get a nice introduction to a bunch of different biases and heuristics impacting you in your life and at work.

Today I decided to give this episode.

On our biases toward others a refresh because of my interview this coming Friday with Dr. Tessa west on her book Jerks at Work. She does research in what causes discomfort and what happens when people feel uncomfortable, which led her to the experience of feeling uncomfortable at work Work. Which of course gets you to those jerks at work and how to deal with them since they're causing a lot of that discomfort. If you enjoyed my conversations with Harvard Business Review contributing editor Amy Gallo on.

Her book Getting along, as well as.

Rob Cross on the Micro Stress Effect and David McRaney on How Minds Change, David's actually the one who recommended I bring Tessa onto the show. Thanks David. I know you're going to love that conversation, so be sure you're subscribed so you can get that episode right when it comes out later this week. For today, as you learn about our biases toward others, take some time to reflect on your working relationships. Who are the jerks and how do they act? And yes, take some time to consider how and when you might have been the jerk as well. It happens, and owning that is the first step to changing it. Don't forget there are links for everything, including past episodes like many that weren't out when this one first aired, as well as books and articles all waiting for you in the show. Notes for this episode, which are found within the app you're listening to and at the brainy business.com 314 all right, let's talk about our biases toward others, including groups.

This first term is probably one you're familiar with, Groupthink. This is essentially what happens when people are in groups and either because they want to have a harmonious experience or not rock the boat or just the hurting mentality of humans, the people within the group start to make bad decisions. These could be irrational or different than what the person would choose to do if left to their own devices. And it's often in an attempt to minimize conflicts in a business. Much like I talked about last week with the example in meetings where the leader is victim to the false consensus effect, the group is less likely to speak up or provide a really in depth analysis or critically evaluate different options or viewpoints to keep from isolating themselves or standing out. Likely this is motivated by a fear of the spotlight effect which we also discussed last week. So if the leader of the meeting is biased to assume everyone is in consensus and those in the group are biased to not voice their opinions, it's amazing we get anything done. One way Amazon combats this is by having a silent start to meetings and I linked to an article from INC about this in the show Notes. Essentially, the leader of the meeting has to write a very well thought out meeting prep document, not just an agenda, and that's presented at the beginning of the meeting. Everyone sits and reads it silently to themselves, making notes in the margins, thinking and prepping for the meeting. These documents can be six pages long and the silent start can take sometimes up to 30 minutes, but it gets people out of their biased brains approach to groups and can allow them to organize their thoughts in advance and make notes about what they want to talk about. I've heard some of these meetings take it a step further by allowing those who are uncomfortable speaking up in meetings, or maybe if someone had a particularly difficult suggestion that they could send it to the meeting leader in advance. So consider some of these tips for your own meetings if you're in an office or even when you're working with clients. Another thing groups can fall victim to is shared information bias. This is when a group will be more likely to hash out items all the people in the group are familiar with, also known as shared information, and they spend less time and energy on the stuff that only some members know about. Unshared information. This could be part of trying to get along and have harmony within a group, but like so many of these biases, it can be counterintuitive and problematic. In many cases, it's better to talk about the less known stuff than to keep rehashing the same topics over and over and over again. So if you find yourself in meetings that keep talking in circles and never making progress, this is probably pretty common also in families and dysfunctional groups. Consider this bias and try to force yourself and the other group members to talk more about the difficult topic. This is very similar to a concept called bike shedding, which you'll hear me talk about on the episode about the lazy brain. But that's basically where you find it easier to talk about a much simpler topic than the one the big thing that you should be talking about. So that is again another concept you'll hear about in a couple of weeks. When you are in a group, be aware of the bandwagon effect, which is when people do or say things just because everyone else does. This is the if all your friends were jumping off a bridge scenario you heard from your parents growing up, and it's very much influenced by hurting. There are countless examples of this. But let's just talk about social media for a minute. Let's say someone follows you on Twitter and you look at their account to see if you should follow them back. What's the first thing you look at? How many followers they have? Let's say the person who followed you has 12 followers. Are you likely to follow back? What if they have 12 followers and joined yesterday? What if they have 12 followers and joined six years ago? What if they have 12 followers AND they're following 3,000 people? Or what if they have 120,000 followers or a million followers? You're probably more likely to follow those with more followers than you are those with only a few. Especially if those people with a few are following a lot of people because it looks like maybe they're kind of spam following? You're also more likely to listen to podcasts with more positive reviews. A quick thank you to everyone who's taken the time to leave reviews of the brainy business, or you'll eat at restaurants with lots of five star reviews. This also comes into play when you're buying things on Amazon, you get the point. The thing is, the number of people who have gone there before doesn't actually indicate whether the place is better than someone or something else. The person with a million followers might post complete garbage, while you would actually like the content from the person who's new and only has 12 followers. But as you're trying to grow your business and social presence, it's important to know how other people, potential customers, react to your followers and stats. It's harder to build the snowball than it is to keep it moving. So no, you will have a lot more effort on the front end, but eventually you're going to hit a tipping point. It'll keep going and maybe when you're looking at people to follow back, try to have an open mind and look at what they've put posted recently and not just some of their stats. Have you ever gone to a networking event and thought, oh man, these people have really got it together. They look so much cooler than me. They probably don't want to talk to me and would be annoyed if I interrupted them. This is because of the cheerleader effect, another term you might have heard. Essentially, people look better and more attractive when they're in a group than when they're by themselves. Strange but true. I guess this is also why it's good to have a wingman or a group of friends when you're out looking for dates. Everyone looks better when they're grouped together. Sort of. Your flaws get pushed down to the wayside and all the positive attributes come together in that networking example or when looking at any group, just remember that things are not always what they seem and if you're intimidated, it might not be necessary. Most people networking are there to talk with new people and will hopefully welcome you in with open arms. And if not, you know, maybe find a new networking group because you might not want to work with those people anyway, but you might really worry that the group will be mean to you because of hostile attribution bias. This reaction is not confined to groups, but can apply to any other person and can be more common in some individuals than others. Those with hostile attribution bias assume and interpret the behavior of others as being hostile even when it's not. I've linked to an article from Psychology that talks about this and I really like their example of how it works. So instead of coming up with a new thing reinventing the wheel, I'm going to read it for you here. Now imagine that Jose accidentally bumps his shopping cart into Melissa's cart in a busy grocery store, then Melissa mistakenly assumes that Jose aggressively bumped her cart to get ahead of her in the aisle. If Melissa then intentionally hits Jose's cart, she has reacted in an aggressive manner that was inappropriate to the situation. And that, in a nutshell, is hostile attribution bias. So if you're inclined to think the worst, maybe stop and take a breath. Now, I'm sure you've heard the term stereotyping, and before we get into this one, I want to note this is a natural tendency and does not have to be hostile in the way you most likely thought of it when I first said the word. At its core, stereotyping is expecting someone who is a member of a group to have certain characteristics, even when you don't know anything about that particular individual. Let's say you're told you're going to meet with a group of MBAs. What sort of assumptions would you make about the people in that group? They're studious, they have jobs working in corporate America or general business. They like numbers, they read a lot of books. They like to read Forbes or Fast Company or the Wall Street Journal. All these stereotypes and associations exist in your mind and you naturally assume every single person you speak with would have most of those qualities. But it's not necessarily true and is built on a stereotype. As another example, if I said you were about to walk into a room of My Little Pony fans a ponycon, who would you expect to find there? Your stereotype may say young children, especially girls. Right? Then you haven't heard of a Brony. The adult fans of my little pony, 80% of which identify as men. Apparently one in ten of them are active duty military or were in the past. And Utah has the highest per capita of Bronies, with nine out of every hundred thousand. A herd census, which was done in 2014, estimates millions of Bronies worldwide, many of which, as I said, are adults. There are tons of groups and associations every person is a part of, and this is a good time to broaden the way you might be thinking about groups. We humans are complex and belong to all sorts of affinity groups that make up our identities. For example, I am a woman and a marketer, an entrepreneur, a podcaster. I love the Beatles and knitting and anything with glitter. I could eat carbs, especially tortilla chips, all day long, every single day. I love Harry Potter and I'm even nerdy enough to know I am part of the Ravenclaw House. I love to travel and I'm a step parent. I don't like scary movies, but I am a big fan of comedies and some dramas. I like musicals more than plays. I love Kate Spade and chai tea lattes and drive a Volvo. This list could go on and on for basically eternity. And as I listed those things, you formed opinions about the type of person I am based on stereotypes and what associations your brain has about those items. The bulk of your perception of any person is based on their group affiliations and a stereotypical bias, which may or may not be true or accurate for me as an individual, but because it's most common for the group as a whole, you assume it's true of me too. So saying I'm a Beatles fan, you would probably think of someone who is older than me. Typically would be the case, but someone who likes Harry Potter is maybe someone who's younger than me. Or someone who likes glitter might be younger than me. And you start to look again at this multi dimensional piece which we talked about last week. We tend to see ourselves as multi dimensional and others as more sort of mono dimensional. So try to remember everyone is very complex and made up of all these different things. One way this sort of stereotypical bias shows up is in what is called I didn't make this one up. It's called the Women are Wonderful Effect. You know, I don't hate the title of that one selfishly, but apparently people tend to associate more positive attributes with women than they do with men. And think about, we've been taught this forever. Think about that old nursery rhyme, snips and snails and puppy dog tails. That's what little boys are made of. Sugar and spice and all things nice. That's what little girls are made of. We're conditioned to think this way and it truly is a stereotype. I would guess this also goes back to maternal instincts and the nurturing bond people have with their mothers and women in general. Similar to this is implicit association. If you were to sort of take this to a point where I would say what's the first thing you think of when I say sugar and spice and all things nice? And you might say girls or women or females. And this is an implicit association. That's how quickly a word comes to mind or matches with a previous word that was said. So if women or girls comes to mind more quickly than boys, it's because of this implicit association. For example, another one would be when I say dog. So 75% of people will think or say cat. So they're closely associated. And while dogs are more closely related to wolves than cats, that isn't how our brains categorize them. So how does this apply to business if looking for an association if you read the term CEO, you would probably be more likely to associate the word man than woman, even if you are a woman, because our brain has closer ties of CEO and man. If you want to hear a little more about this, listen to episode 33 when I interviewed Dr. Palma from the Texas A and M Human Behavior Lab about their research into changing the title from CEO and how it might result in more female leaders. For whatever reason, studies have shown that people are quicker to pair terms like white and pleasant then black and pleasant, which could be for all sorts of reasons that have nothing to do with race. But the question still comes up as to whether this cognitive bias and association could lead to prejudices the person doesn't even realize. You could also think about doctor versus nurse and what came to your mind most readily, or cheerleader or scientist. Many of these associations have been in our brains since childhood and they're based on long held stereotypes that might not be serving us, but they are hard to fix, especially if we do not know that they're there. So listening to this episode is a first step, hopefully in making some changes. And here is a really unfortunate bias because of the moral credential effect. If you have tended to not be prejudiced in the past, your likelihood of being prejudiced in the future is actually higher. Sort of a I'm never prejudice and therefore I'm not by nature, so it's okay if I am. This time effect. This could also mean you're more likely to justify a misconduct if you've been good in the past, or if someone else has. Think of juries and how they look at past records in making a decision today, someone with a clean record will likely be judged less harshly than someone who has something on their record, even if the two items are completely unrelated. And maybe something was a long time ago. And this can come up in HR scenarios as well. Last week I talked about the actor observer bias and how if someone else is late for a meeting or we assume it's because of a flaw in their personality, but if we are late for a meeting, it's because of outside factors. The previous meeting ran long, you got stuff in traffic and it's not about our overall personality. This is also called fundamental attribution error, and it's important to keep in mind when thinking about how we assess the actions and choices of other people, either alone or in groups. Even though it's your natural inclination to Think their behavior is because of their personality. Sometimes it's better to give the benefit of the doubt and maybe take the proverbial walk in their shoes and ask what would I say about this if it were me? When people experience the flip of this thinking, others behavior is due to situation and their own behaviors are more about their personality. It's called extrinsic incentives bias. While not always the case, this could be used for say, people getting promoted. If someone else gets promoted, you might say it's because they were in the right place at the right time, or that they got a chance on a project you didn't get. And if you got the promotion, it's because of your grit and determination and all your hard work paying off. When this is applied to groups, it's called group attribution error. And similar to the stereotyping bias, this is where a person would say that the characteristics of one person reflect those of the entire group and that the group's decision is reflective of the preference or choice of everyone in the group. Unfortunately, this bias exists in our brains even when there is information around that shows it to be wrong. Let's say you work in finance. You go to a conference and meet someone who works in marketing, and you find them to be obnoxious and flaky. You are now likely to think all marketers are obnoxious and flaky. Or if you hear that the executive team is announcing a reorganization, you will likely assume everyone is on board with the decision and totally supports it, voted for it, advocated for it, even though there was likely a lot of debate and conversation that went on behind the scenes. When you make an internal attribution error to the whole group instead of the individuals that make it up, it's called ultimate attribution error. To combat this, consider what it would have been like if you were in a group. Actually think of every group you've ever been in. How often did everyone agree on every single item? Especially with groups that have been working together for a long time like an executive team, it's probably not very often. Even though we have some other biases that help keep us in line and we don't always speak up and are trying to keep some harmony. And just try to remember that when your biased brain starts thinking in generalities. When we apply this bias bias to individuals instead of a group, it's called the halo effect. You probably know about this in the positive sense, which is a term you're more likely to associate with the word halo. Remember we just talked about that See how easy this is to do? Anyway, in the positive sense, you might think that someone who's attractive is more likely to be talented and good at other things, even though the items are completely unrelated. If you saw Susan Boyle's audition on Britain's Got Talent, you may remember that when she walked out and said she wanted to be a professional singer, everyone laughed at her and figured she could not possibly be a great singer because of the way she looked and dressed. This was of course ridiculous because there are plenty of attractive people who couldn't carry a tune in a bucket, and vocal ability has nothing to do with physical attractiveness. But the halo effect causes one positive quality to spill over and influence our perception of the other qualities. In the negative sense, you could possibly assume someone who you think is a total jerk must be bad in other aspects of life as well. You might see them as doing sloppy work or being a bad driver or a terrible cook and be surprised to find out that they volunteer at a soup kitchen every weekend. The rule of the halo effect is to not let one quality influence your opinion of a person as a whole. As I've really been saying throughout the episode, our brains rationalize by assuming everyone else is more predictable and one dimensional, unlike our multi dimensional selves. And my general advice is to be aware of these and try to think of other people as multidimensional and remember that every group is made up of multiple multidimensional people. All right, moving on to groups of people like us. In general, we like people who are like us more than people who are not like us. This is called the in group bias, and people are more likely to give preferential treatment to people who they see as part of their own group or who they think are like them. This can be an issue with promotions in a field that's dominated by a particular gender or other type of person. According to TopResume, 81% of veterinarians are female. If the in group bias is in play and a female veterinarian was looking to hire a new member to the team or to promote someone, and there were two candidates, one male and one female, they might be more likely to promote or hire the female because that candidate reminds her of herself. This of course happens for all sorts of groups and can sometimes be touted as a benefit. Have you seen the commercial for University of Phoenix where the candidate has on their red socks and passes all the people along the way with red socks and it implies he's more likely to get the job because the hiring manager is also wearing red socks which indicates they all went to the University of Phoenix. This is using in group bias as an advantage and goes to show why it's important to look at both sides of any bias. Like people, everything has a light and a shadow side. It's important to be aware of the biases, look to avoid them when they could be doing harm, and understand how to navigate them positively when you can. I have of course linked to that video in the show notes if you want to see it. Another place where in group bias can come up is when hearing about a victim in a story. Defensive attribution hypothesis occurs when people assign more blame as their similarity to the victim increases. This can be both in physical attributes or situational similarities. This is why lawyers are able to select juries and will dismiss jurors who they think would be likely to sympathize with the side they're arguing against. So if a victim was attacked on a bus on the way home from school, you would want to remove jurors who take the bus, who attend school currently, who went to the same school, or who have a close family member like a child who's around the same age or attends the same school if you're defending the alleged attacker. But those on the prosecution would want those people on the jury whether the jurors want to or not or realize it or not. These biases impact their decisions to convict or not and the amount they award in damages. And they impact us all when considering people in groups similar to us or different, even when the stakes aren't quite so high. Because we like people and things that are like us, we tend to think of other beings as having human like qualities even when they don't. Anthropocentric thinking is when we use human analogies and thought processes when considering less familiar non human things. A common example would be noting that most humans think of death as a negative thing. They apply this same value to non human entities even though death is necessary for many ecosystems to thrive. Like a tree that falls in the forest and dies, but then becomes a nurse log for lots of other organisms to live off of. This could apply to business where someone may feel inclined to avoid death at all costs and not properly look at a situation for what it is. Companies have a life cycle and so do products. When a product is in a dying portion of the life cycle, it's best to adopt a different strategy than when it's growing or maintaining. If you have the right strategy, you can continue to make money through the decline and transition through a shutdown of a division or product. If you're constantly trying to get back what you had or could have been, or looking at competitors success and trying more and more outrageous strategies to avoid death, you could end up sacrificing other divisions or the entire organization as a result. Think about CDs when iPods and other digital music players came on the scene. There's really nothing that the makers of CDs can do to make digital music go away, and it's a much better product. If they try to chase the glory of CDs to avoid death, they could end up killing everything. But if they were to embrace that a change is happening and look at other ways to use CDs, possibly other applications or ways their technology could apply to other industries or for other innovations, they could prolong their ramp down and and ensure it's profitable to the end we also tend to see human like qualities in animals, objects and abstract concepts. This is called anthropomorphism or as you might remember from school personification. We naturally assume dogs that look like they're smiling are happy because that is what a human would look like, even though that isn't really how a dog expresses happiness. And this is why we have mascots and I have brain and there are countless children's movies featuring talking animals and cars with human emotions. We like things like us and our brains want to make everything human like now let's wrap this up with the biases around groups and people that are different than us. I'm guessing you're already predicting that these will be a little bit more negative, but I'm ending with them to help you to think about ways that you can maybe modify some of these if you've done them, or just to be aware of them when you see this in others. And maybe it's an opportunity to share with people and that you have this foundation now to build into what we could be doing differently. Because we like people like us and we tend to think of ourselves as more varied and multi dimensional than others, it's probably not surprising to learn that because of out group homogeneity bias, we think members of our own groups are more likely to be varied and dynamic than members of other groups. We also have reactive evaluation, which means we will think less of proposals or suggestions that we believe came from an adversary or someone not like us or the bias we've set up. This is why countless authors use pen names like J.K. rowling for a chance to be evaluated on their merit instead of being kicked to the curb before they even had a chance because of a cognitive bias. And much like the hindsight and justification biases I explained last week, our brains will explain all sorts of reasons to itself as to why it has nothing to do with the candidate being a woman or their age or whatever it is. But the subconscious and conscious don't talk.

Well to each other.

So as much as you wish you did, you don't really know the root of that decision and it's very likely to be in a bias, especially if you're not aware of it. Similar to this, the not invented here bias is an aversion to using or coming into contact or referencing any information that was developed outside the in group. Not to get into politics, but a Democrat would be less likely to use or believe statistics that came from a Republican even if they proved their own point and were useful to them and vice versa. And for better or worse, our biases extend to man made life forms as well. Due to form function attribution bias, people are more likely to make systematic errors when they interact with robots than when they don't. This could be due to intimidation of something they believe to be different than them, or maybe assuming the robot can think quicker than them, they create a self fulfilling prophecy. The important thing to note is that the errors and assumptions people make don't necessarily have anything to do with the function of the robot. Whether you're dealing with robots or animals, groups or individuals, people like you or different than you, be aware of all these biases and consider how much they impact your experience every single day. Can you spot the biases in your life? Try and identify these biases today. Look for them and see where you might be anthropomorphizing or unfairly judging someone who's different than you or favoring someone like you. Then ask yourself, is this right? Is it serving me? Is it serving them? Who am I inadvertently holding back? Who should I give the benefit of the doubt to and try to get along with better? Let's open our minds and try to do a little bit to make the world a little less biased and a.

Little more thoughtful, shall we? So what got your brain buzzing as you learned about our biases toward others today?

For me, I really love being able.

To revisit episodes from so early in the podcast. This one was still within the first year of the show, so I've been talking about all these things for a really long time, so it's cool to see how much is the same and what's different. As I've worked with clients and given talks and created courses and written books and things over the years for biases toward others. The biggest bias that comes to mind for me is fundamental attribution error, which now has its own episode which is of course linked for you in the show notes. It is my top recommended episode to listen to after this one. This is the phenomenon where when someone cuts you off in traffic and they are instantly a jerk, but when you cut someone off, you have an explanation for why it happened and believe you're still a good person. Give yourself the benefit of the doubt in a way that those other people don't get we do this at work all the time too. We and those who we determine as part of our in crowd get the benefit of the doubt. The US's, but the thems don't get that same benefit. The easiest example for this is showing.

Up late for the meeting.

Thems who are late are rude and disrespectful uses who are late get some grace as I always say now in my presentations on this and when I talk about it in my book what your employees need and can't tell you. I don't want you to get a complex about it or anything, but it's important to remember that you are many other people's them.

Give people the benefit of the doubt.

When you can expand your circles of empathy to have more us's and less thems and be open to better relationships with everyone in your life, both personal and at work. And on that note, get ready for this coming Friday's episode with Tessa west discussing her great book Jerks at Work, Toxic Co Workers and what to do about them. She gives great insights into the seven categories of jerks, which include the Kiss Up, Kick Downer, the Credit Stealer, the Bulldozer, the Free Rider, the Micromanager, the Neglectful Boss, and the Gaslighter and how to work better with all of those people, as well as how to know which type of jerk you're working with. And in our conversation she gives tips for entrepreneurs and small business owners to avoid accidentally creating a jerk breeding environment, and we talk about incentives and how.

Those can tie in.

It's all a really great conversation and I know you're going to love it. So if you aren't already subscribed to the podcast, now is a great time to do so to ensure you don't miss that episode or any of the others as they come out. And of course, don't forget about the show Notes to check out related past episodes Books like Jerks at work and articles. It's all waiting for you in the show notes@the brainybusiness.com 314 and just like that, episode 314 on our biases toward others, including groups, is done.

Join me Friday for a brand new.

Episode with Dr. Tessa west to discuss her book, Jerks at Work.

It's going to be a lot of fun.

You don't want to miss it. Until then, thanks again for listening and learning with me. And remember to be thoughtful.

Thank you for listening to the Brainy Business Podcast. Molina offers virtual strategy sessions, workshops, and other services to help businesses be more brain friendly. For more free resources, visit thebrainybusiness.com.