Bias
Jesus said, “For judgment I have come into this world, so that those who do not see may gain their sight, and the ones who see may become blind.”
Some of the Pharisees who were with him heard this and asked him, “We are not blind too, are we?”
Jesus replied, “If you were blind, you would not be guilty of sin, but now because you claim that you can see, your guilt remains” (John 9:39-41).
Have you ever noticed the “new car” phenomenon? If you purchase a car of a new make or model, all of a sudden, you start noticing a lot more of that make and/or model on the road.
Have you heard of the “gorilla suit” study? People were invited to participate in a study in which they were told to focus on a particular activity going on in a video. During that video a person in a gorilla suit would appear. When asked if they saw anyone in a gorilla suit, a not insignificant percentage of people said “no.”
Likewise, have you recently wondered if you have become a prophet or a son of a prophet because you seem eerily able to predict exactly how people are going to respond to a given piece of news or a new finding based on their political or philosophical perspectives?
In all of these examples, cognitive bias is in play.
A significant part of the development of critical thinking involves awareness of bias. Bias is generally reckoned as a form of distortion or prejudice, and is itself often brought up with extreme prejudice: an inclination, for a host of reasons, to favor a given idea, group, or stance against another in a way perceived to be unfair. We have all become quite familiar with confirmation bias: the impulse to receive and interpret all data in ways which confirm our prior beliefs and perceptions, and great resistance and skepticism toward any data which would undermine those beliefs. Attribution error and implicit bias involve judging behaviors based on perceived personality traits and subconscious prejudicial judgment of an individual based on perceived group association, respectively. Our predilection to favor people “like us” is affinity bias; our great confidence in ourselves and our judgments is the overconfidence or “Dunning-Kruger” effect. Our desire to continue to do things as we always have, and concern about or resistance against change, is the status quo effect. It is easy for people to believe people who are aesthetically attractive must have other attractive characteristics, and for us to believe people who have been highly successful in one field will be successful in others. We prove far more willing to take credit for the things we have done well and to downplay or suppress all things in which we have not done as well. We are convinced we had well predicted what would happen. For that matter, our judgments about a given situation often prove dependent on our physical condition: for good reason we say that we are not ourselves when we are hungry. Bias thus manifests itself in manifold ways.
Bias remains antithetical to the endeavor to obtain “objective” information and understanding regarding the world around us. We can well understand why many prove very hostile to bias if their desire is to develop a transcendent perspective which purports to overcome all personal prejudices.
This aspiration to objectivity is a major hallmark of Enlightenment rationalism. While we might be able to appreciate the goal of objectivity, and commend attempts to grapple with one’s own prejudices and limitations in perspective, the time is well past to presume any human being can truly become objective in their perspective. Enlightenment rationalism was founded on overly optimistic assumptions regarding human capacity which never sat well with Scripture and now stands at variance with scientific discoveries regarding cognition.
According to the witness of Scripture God made human beings as part of the creation, finite with broad but not unlimited understanding (Genesis 1:1-2:3). Humans have always been “contextual” creatures, living in particular times and places and formed by those times and places more than forming them. God’s thoughts and ways have always been higher than man’s (Isaiah 55:8-9); if there is any hope for “pure objectivity,” it will only be manifest on the divine level. Humans are not merely created and finite; they have also been corrupted in their fallenness: the ways we think, feel, and act are subject to corruption and futility on account of sin and death (Romans 5:12-21, 8:17-23). Anxiety and fear prove as powerful as motivators for how we understand things as any noble quest for truth.
Science has also cast aspersions on many of the assumptions we have maintained about our ability to perceive our environment. Everything we perceive through our five senses are, to some degree or another, constructed by our brains. The brain’s ability to take in the electrical impulses generated by the sense organs and construct what we see, hear, etc., is amazing, astonishing, and should compel us to give glory to God our Creator; at the same time, the brain is both filtering out a lot of data and interpreting a lot of data lest it, and we, get overwhelmed.
Both the “new car” phenomenon and the “gorilla suit” study exemplify for us, and explain, the situation in which we find ourselves. Our brains are not mere “objective” data processors; in order to be able to focus on certain details we deem important at any given moment, the brain by necessity must de-emphasize, or functionally ignore, many other details. While it remains possible that a given car make and/or model truly has become more popular and thus more visible over time, it is more likely that there have always been plenty of those car makes and/or models driving around; the brain had no particular reason to notice, and so it, and we, did not. It is beyond a doubt that the images of a person in a gorilla suit were processed by the eye and brain; but in pursuing the task to focus on a given activity, the brain filtered out that data which proved extraneous to the task at hand, and thus plenty of people did not “notice” the person in the gorilla suit.
What proves true regarding perception also proves true regarding cognition. Just like our brains interpret sensory data to construct our perception of our environment, so we interpret how we understand ourselves and our world by means of the ideological framework(s) we have built and cultivated over time. These frameworks prove necessary for our sanity: we do not have the brain processing capacity, let alone the time, to take each piece of data we receive, examine it thoroughly and objectively, and adjust our frameworks accordingly. Just like the brain takes in data and filters out what it deems less important or relevant so as to focus on or highlight what it deems more important and relevant, so we likewise privilege certain forms of information and comparatively ignore or dismiss other forms of information.
Ironically, therefore, our bias against bias is unhelpfully overly prejudicial. Bias is not some aberration based on the naivete of the simple masses; instead, bias is built into the way we receive input from our environment and how we process the information we receive. Since we will continually remain human, and thus subject to the limitations and frailty common to humanity, we will never be able to escape bias.
Any attempt to fully overcome bias, therefore, proves a fool’s errand. We cannot stop being human; none of us have God-level perspective on anything. Yet such does not mean we should fall into some kind of existential despair. The Lord Jesus Christ knows what mankind is and has given us a way forward.
In John 9:39-41 John concluded the story of Jesus healing a man born blind. The Pharisees wonder if they are blind. Jesus told them they would be without guilt if they were blind; because they said they saw, their sin remained. Likewise, in warning people about judgment in Matthew 7:1-4, Jesus encouraged people to see themselves as having beams in their eye while seeing specks in the eyes of others. Only a hypocrite could point out the speck without noticing the beam; Jesus counseled people to first remove the beam from their own eye before they could take out the specks in the eyes of others.
Both exhortations direct us to proper humility. We are very cognizant of the way others express bias; yet how often do we prove willing to come to grips with our own? We find no lack of people willing to baptize and justify their biases and prejudices by presuming the way they understand things to be the way God understands things, as the “Biblical” way of understanding things, and the like. We get into the most trouble when we dogmatically insist on our perspective as the correct one, presuming that we truly see, yet according to the perspective of God in Christ, prove truly blind.
It is good to aspire to have one’s viewpoints shaped by what God has made known in Christ and to resist the seductive ways of the philosophies of this world (cf. Colossians 2:1-10). We do well to grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ, who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life (John 14:6, 2 Peter 3:18). At the same time, we remain human and our perspectives remain limited and thus biased. We will not be able to fully overcome that bias; the best we can do is to consider different perspectives so as to become more aware of our biases, and to hold more lightly onto our ideologies, perspectives, and viewpoints since they all do reflect biases in many ways. We should show charity toward those with whom we disagree and prove willing to submit the ideas of those with whom we feel we have affinity to as great, if not even greater, scrutiny as those with whom we feel we do not have affinity.
Human beings, therefore, cannot escape bias. The best we can do is recognize it and prove less dogmatic in our confidence in our frameworks and perception. May we prove humble, confessing our limitations in perspective and understanding, and thus prove willing to hold our judgments lightly so that we might be found faithful to God in Christ through the Spirit!
Ethan R. Longhenry
The post Bias appeared first on de Verbo vitae.
