How Do You Assess Other Peoples' Bias?

Why it matters in conflict escalation.

Last week, a rally supporting Israel that began peacefully ended with a man getting shot. It all happened in minutes. Though the injured party will be ok, I recommend not watching the video (for obvious reasons, it’s disturbing). But I do recommend that we take a moment to reflect on what happened. This event, like too many others, offers an important example of healthy disagreements can all too quickly yield tragic outcomes. This is the topic we’ll dig into today.

Let’s begin by thinking about how we assess people who agree with us versus those who disagree with us about topics like, say, religion. Or what we think of people with certain political leanings. Or how we judge people who pretend coffee that tastes like a milkshake counts as actual coffee.¹

You might have noticed any number of things, but the one I want to call your attention to first is that you judged. And you’re probably still judging—and now you’re likely judging me because I’m clearly overstating my case. But here’s the facts: you are a judgmental person because, guess what, we all are. It’s simply part of what the human brain is wired to do. And one way we judge others is in terms of how biased we think they are. People who are religiously different than you—they seem to be missing something. People who identify with the opposing political party? They seem ignorant and immoral. Those pretend coffee drinkers? Well, let’s not lower ourselves to immature name calling.

But as for ourselves? We tend to think we have a pretty accurate read on the facts at hand. That difference in how we view others’ biases versus our own can cause trouble.

We Are All Blind Men

I’m going to share some really cool research but want to start with my favorite ancient parable about an elephant and some blind men. The story goes as follows:

Some blind men who had never encountered an elephant before it came to their village wanted to understand what it was. Each one used his sense of touch to learn, then attempted to share what he had learned with the other men. But because the creature was enormous, each learned a very different truth. The one who touched the tusk said, "It's a spear!" The one who touched the trunk said, "It's a snake!" The one who touched the side said, "It's a wall!" So confident in their individual perceptions of truth was each man that when he heard the others describing entirely different truths, each began to grow distrustful—then downright furious. Why would your opponent refuse to see their own bias and instead insult us by pretending their truth is accurate?

Image by Pexels from Pixabay

Research confirms the truth in what this parable is trying to teach us: that our perceptions of others’ biases can very easily fuel conflict. Others are biased, and they stay biased even when we correct them. The irony, of course, is that we struggle to perceive our own biases.

Consider one powerful report showing that even after people have been shown how their evaluations are affected maintain that they are being accurate and objective. That means, we can show someone their bias, and moments later they’ll drop right back into thinking they are seeing things accurately.

An intriguing study confirms the finding that we tend to judge others as biased, ourselves as less so, and that difference in how we view our bias versus others’ bias is what contributes to conflict escalation. As researchers from a 2016 study titled “When Disagreement Gets Ugly: Perceptions of Bias and the Escalation of Conflict” summarized:

People who disagree perceive each other as biased, and those perceptions in turn lead them to take conflict-escalating actions against each other (which in turn engender further perceptions of bias, continuing the spiral).

Let me reiterate what these researchers are saying because it feels extremely important in the context of quickly-escalating conflict: viewing other people as being extremely biased (ignorant, immoral, or just plain evil, for instance) causes us to feel more righteous. And more righteousness causes us to more easily justify taking quick and assertive action in conflict. It causes us to feel we have no other choice.

Let’s walk this through with a trivial example of conflicts about loading the dishwasher². I mean, if your partner is ridiculous enough to believe that knives should be pointing down in the cutlery basket, then you should correct them, right? Except it turns out that your partner loads the dishwasher the way they do on purpose. So, now they think you’re a biased and rather arrogant jerk for dishwasher-splaining to them. With both sides believing in their loading righteousness and both sides seeing the other as ridiculous and potentially dangerous in their thinking, conflict easily erupts.

It’s no wonder something much more significant can go from peaceful to dangerous in mere minutes.

You can see the righteousness in the social media posts from both the man who attacked the protesters peacefully demonstrating and the man who, in response, pulled out his gun and shot that man. Before the day of the conflict, both saw the other side of the Middle East conflict as deeply problematic, one writing “Hey Jew haters. Bring it,” the other writing “I urge you, every day, to do something to destabilize this empire.” They both showed up that day ready for a fight. And when provocation came, no one offered a pathway through calming things down. Instead, both participants readily escalated.

So, how do we prevent conflict escalation when we see the other side as being so very wrong?

We can’t undo how our brains operate, but we can become more cognizant. This is something I come back to again and again the couples’ therapy room where partners predictably default to seeing their partner’s view as downright wrong and thus in need of correction, only to find that their partner believes the same about them.

Attempting to correct other people’s biases gets us locked into escalating conflict. Let’s practice doing something different.

When you are locked in battle with someone we love or someone from our work or social community, here are some strategies to try instead:

1. Slow things down. Hostage negotiator, Gary Noesner’s book Stalling for Time makes the important point that conflict can be more easily defused when we slow things down. It’s a tactic used in high intensity hostage-taker situations. Nobel prizewinning psychology, Daniel Kahneman explains why this can help our thinking in his book Thinking Fast and Slow. That is, that slowing things down helps us prevent impulsive action and prompts more, well, thoughtful thinking.

2. Notice your own biases. Rather than trying to correct other people’s biases—they aren’t likely to be receptive to you on this front—try catching your own. We all have them, so get comfortable with locating where yours reside. Where do you tend to start the story of a fight? How does it differ from what your opposition believes is the starting point? What parts of the battle do you emphasize? What parts do you de-emphasize (particularly when this differs between you and your counterpart)?

3. Engage your beginner’s mind—deliberately. Our minds have a tendency to assume that we know all we need to know. Practicing what Buddhists call our “beginner’s mind” helps us more intentionally recognize that there is often more to know, particularly when it comes to complex social situations. We can ask ourselves the kinds of questions intellectually humble people ask, like “how might my assumptions be causing me to distort or overlook important information?”

Let’s face it, other people are wrong and, at times, their wrongness will piss you off. It may even downright terrify you. But you are biased, too. And sometimes your biases place you at risk for being a part of an escalating conflict. So, even if you can’t control how other people think, you can grow skill in managing whether you’re the person who escalates things, or if you are the person who helps to slow things down, who instead of being an escalator serves as a de-escalator.³

Goodness knows we need more de-escalators.

---

1. Ok, that’s me. Though, I’ve recently been trying to teach myself to drink my coffee black—you know, because I am in my 40s and pretending to have a mature palate. But drinking black coffee is much harder than it looks and this NYT article proves that I’m not alone. What’s your favorite coffee milkshake? Mine is a Halva latte from Tatte Bakery.

2. Dishwasher loading, however, does turn out to be quite significant. It’s one of the top reasons couples fight. You’re in good company;)

3. De-escalator sounds weird, even as I’m writing it. Apologies, but I don’t know a better word. Mostly because it’s late at night as I’m writing this. Feel free to ping me with better suggestions.