Posts Tagged ‘biases’

Reduce stress! Become more creative in three steps

Tuesday, March 22nd, 2011


Life is a cascade of challenge. Sometimes the flow trickles and sometimes it roars. How well you navigate determines who you are and your quality of life. Do you embrace the flow or avoid it? Does a torrent motivate or immobilize you? Do you look to the future with hope or fear?

Your answers to these questions probably correlate to your creative skill. A creative person sees opportunity in challenge. She tolerates and does not fear ambiguity. Entering life’s white waters, she is not paralyzed by stress but energized by the exhilaration. She does not look back or paddle upstream but races downstream toward the new vistas beckoning.

In Iconoclast: a Neuroscientist Reveals How to Think Differently, Gregory Berns explains how highly creative individuals are hard wired. fMRI studies indicate that iconoclasts’ brains differ in terms of perception, fear response and social intelligence. Importantly, he provides practical ways for each of us to nurture such capabilities in ourselves. Yes! We can rewire the circuits and become more creative by pursuing three specific strategies:

  • Bombard the brain with novel experiences and learn to see differently
  • Tame the stress response and overcome fear
  • Develop social intelligence and persuade others to accept your novel ideas

The neuroscience behind creativity


Because the human mind runs on just 40 watts of power, it constantly seeks to conserve energy. It takes a lot of shortcuts, including in the area of perception. According to Berns, “the most likely way you perceive something will be in a manner consistent with your past experience. Commonplace perceptions feel comfortable and cost little energy to process.” The brain categorizes your past experience and then draws from these categories to determine what you “see.” By its nature, the brain does not want to expend the energy required to see differently.

Step #1: Bombard the brain with novel experiences and learn to see differently

Bern’s studies indicate that iconoclasts’ brains are more easily able to see differently — that is, their brains do not seek to conserve energy at the expense of creative insight. What about the rest of us? When confronting life’s cascade of challenge, what can we do to generate innovative solutions?

Berns suggests that we intentionally shock the brain with novel experiences, compelling it to expend the energy required to achieve creative insight. “By forcing the visual system to see things in different ways, you can increase the odds of new insights.” Specifically, he suggests that the “surest way to evoke the imagination is to confront the perceptual system with people, places, and things that it hasn’t seen before…In order to think creatively…bombard the brain with new experiences. Only then will it be forced out of efficiency mode and reconfigure its neural networks.”

For those who can learn to see differently, the brain has another, even more primal attribute that inhibits creative action. Fear. We fear the criticism, rejection and ridicule that may result from thinking differently. We avoid the risk associated with possible failure. We recoil from ambiguity because we fear the unknown. According to Berns, “The stress system is not rational. It reacts when provoked, and this reaction is powerful enough to derail many of the most innovative people out there.”

Step #2: Tame the stress response and overcome fear

Berns offers a number of specific strategies to overcome fear. None are simple and all require persistence and courage. For example, he says we need to understand the effects of fear and then re-frame it. Instead of fearing failure, train yourself to focus on its potential for learning and growth. Similarly, learn to tolerate ambiguity. The unknown can prove either detrimental or helpful to us. Berns suggests that we nurture the ability to mitigate our fear of the unknown by seeing its possible benefits. Finally, to avoid fear of ridicule, recruit a like-minded person to support you when you present an innovative idea to others.

Let’s assume that you have successfully tamed fear and are generating creative ideas. According to Berns, you have one final hurdle: taming the fear in others. Novel ideas are different. By its nature, the brain perceives what is different to be threatening. This is a primal response.

Step #3: Develop social intelligence and persuade others to accept your innovative ideas

Seeing differently and taming the stress response do not guarantee your success in creative endeavors. To implement novel ideas, you need to light up the brain’s circuits for social networking.

“In order to sell one’s ideas, one must create a positive reputation that will draw people toward something that is initially unfamiliar and potentially scary. Familiarity helps build one’s reputation…successful iconoclasts have an uncommon ability to connect on a social level that transcends the idea itself. The key to doing this is through social networks. In order to be successful, the iconoclast builds a network through two fundamental approaches: familiarity and reputation.”

Navigate life’s quick water with dexterity and joy


Reduce your stress! Face your unique cascade of challenge with a creative worldview. See differently, tame your fear and build social networks based on familiarity and reputation. While you may not become an iconoclast, you will surely navigate life’s quick waters with greater dexterity and joy.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in All blog posts, Creativity & problem solving | Comments Off

Are Too Many Options Bad For You?

Sunday, August 15th, 2010

Ever since I read Sidney Parnes’ The Magic of Your Mind more than twenty years ago, I have firmly believed that having more options is preferable to having fewer options. On the other hand, just about every time I go to the grocery store, I wish there were fewer choices. So I am conflicted: my training and belief system tell me the more options, the better; my experience, sometimes just the opposite.

Research now validates the conflict I experience.

Sheena Iyengar’s fascinating presentation, On the Art of Choosing, discusses the impact of culture on decision-making. One of her key research findings is that the American belief that more options are better than fewer is not universally held by all cultures: “Though all humans share the basic need and desire for choice, we don’t all see choice in the same places or to the same extent.”

I find this interesting but not surprising. What did surprise me is her assertion that even for Americans, having too many options can result in poorer decision-making: “When there are too many choices to compare and contrast, the process of choosing can be confusing and frustrating. Instead of making better choices, we become overwhelmed by choice, sometimes even afraid of it. Choice no longer offers opportunities but imposes constraints.” In fact, Iyengar’s research demonstrates that when you give people “ten or more options when they are making a choice, they make poor decisions.”

To view Iyengar’s full discussion of the impact of culture on decision-making, click below. If you wish to go directly to her dismantling of the assumption that the “more choices you have, the more likely you are to make the best choice,” fast forward to 8 minutes 10 seconds.

Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in All blog posts, Creativity & problem solving, Decision-making | 1 Comment »

The Monkey Business Illusion

Monday, August 2nd, 2010


The video below tests your perceptual acuity. Listen carefully to the directions and then watch the video. (Note: if you think you’ve seen this video, you probably have not. It is a May 2010 sequel to the widely viewed 1999 selective attention test video that many of you probably have seen.)




How did you do? Miss anything? If you did, you are in good company. I, for one, counted the number of passes correctly but failed to see the gorilla in the 1999 version. And in this new version I missed the player in black dropping out. On a positive note: I did notice the color change!

Cognitive scientist Daniel Simons showed the video to 76 University of Illinois students. As reported in i-PERCEPTION, for those who had not seen the 1999 version, only 56% noticed the gorilla (23 out of 41). Just “11% of subjects noticed the curtain change, and 16% noticed the change to the number of players on the black team. Only 1 participant noticed both the curtain and the player change.”

Simons defines the phenomenon as inattentional blindness, “the failure to notice unusual and salient events in their visual world when attention is otherwise engaged and the events are unexpected.” In a Seed Magazine interview, he discusses the implications to our everyday life:

In inattentional blindness you’re not seeing something that’s right there because your attention is engaged. The most obvious practical application of that is driving. We intuitively think that if something important happens right in front of us, we will see it…Dan Levin has done studies where he just asked people, would you notice if something like this happens? He shows people the video, gives them the instructions, points out the gorilla, and then asks them “how likely would you be to notice the gorilla if you were doing this task and counting the passes?” Ninety percent of people say they’d notice. Regardless of how you ask that question, you get high confidence, and a high percentage saying “yeah, of course I’d notice that.”

That’s the intuition that’s interesting, and that’s the one that’s dangerous. If we were completely aware of these limits on attention, we wouldn’t do things like talking on cell phone while driving: We would know that it would make us just that much less likely to notice something. But we don’t have that insight into our own awareness. It’s only in that rare case where you actually have an accident that you become aware that you’ve missed something.

As Simon’s studies have demonstrated, we are all prone to innattentional blindness. What impact does it have on our problem solving? What salient events in our visual field are we missing, even though we are confident we are not? How often do we see what we are looking for and not what is there?

Post script

Science News reports on April 25, 2011 that a new study purports that multitaskers are better at spotting “invisible” Gorillas.


Tags: , , , , , ,
Posted in All blog posts, Decision-making | Comments Off

Lebron’s Decision-making Fallacy

Friday, July 9th, 2010


I suppose that if you are regularly referred to as the “Chosen One” and the “Second Coming,” it’s understandable that you would anoint yourself the “King.” And then why not have an appropriately regal coronation on ESPN? Certainly, your subjects — prostrated and intoxicated by awe and wonder — will praise the wisdom of your decision-making.

Like Homer’s ancient heroes, Lebron James is driven by a deep desire to defeat mortality and to live perpetually as the greatest and most admired basketball player ever. And he was likely traveling that path, until his certainty bias washed out the road.

Outside of Miami, fan and media response to his narcissistic self-annointing has been nearly universally scathing. Just a few examples:

How did James miscalculate so egregiously? He was a victim of certainty bias.

Robert Burton, author of On Being Certain, has exposed the hazards of “believing you are right even when you’re not.” His central premise: “Despite how certainty feels, it is neither a conscious choice nor even a thought process. Certainty and similar states of ‘knowing what we know’ are sensations that feel like thoughts, but arise out of involuntary brain mechanisms that function independently of reason.”

In an October 2008 article in Scientific American entitled The Certainty Bias: A Potentially Dangerous Mental Flaw, Burton discusses how to avoid its pitfalls: “I don’t believe that we can avoid certainty bias, but we can mitigate its effect by becoming aware of how our mind assesses itself…I’ve taken strong exception to the popular notion that we can rely upon hunches and gut feelings as though they reflect the accuracy of a thought.

“My hope is the converse; we need to recognize that the feelings of certainty and conviction are involuntary mental sensations, not logical conclusions. Intuitions, gut feelings and hunches are neither right nor wrong but tentative ideas that must then be submitted to empirical testing. If such testing isn’t possible (such as in deciding whether or not to pull out of Iraq), then we must accept that any absolute stance is merely a personal vision, not a statement of fact.”

No one reading this blog has been deified. But like Lebron James, we are all susceptible to certainty bias. Good thinking requires that we be aware of and avoid its dangers. As Burton concludes: “Only in the absence of certainty can we have open-mindedness, mental flexibility and willingness to contemplate alternative ideas.”


Tags: , , , ,
Posted in All blog posts, Decision-making | Comments Off

Putting on the Blinders of Partisan Bias

Monday, May 24th, 2010


Lately, I have noticed a striking phenomenon. My republican friends regularly complain about the nation’s budget deficit. My democratic friends suddenly are not complaining about the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan.

Why do I find this striking? Well, just a short time ago when George W. Bush was president, my republican friends did not complain about the nation’s budget deficit, despite the fact that Mr. Bush ran up $4 trillion in debt. Similarly, before Barack Obama‘s election, my democratic friends couldn’t stop complaining about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“Hold on,” you might say, “things have changed.” Well, yes, the deficit has continued to grow and, yes, our involvement in Iraq has diminished. However, much of the current deficit accumulated under President Bush and, while our troops have begun to withdraw from Iraq, there has been continued escalation of their involvement in Afghanistan.

I like my republican and democratic friends. I think they are reasonable people. So what is going on here?

In How We Decide, Jonathan Lehrer describes how partisan bias prevents sound thinking, reasoning and decision-making. Lehrer highlights Emory University professor Drew Westen‘s study of voters in the 2004 election. Weston showed study subjects statements made by candidates George Bush and John Kerry that were clearly self-contradictory. Subjects were then asked to rate the level of contradiction. As you might expect, voters ratings were “largely determined by their partisan allegiances.”

“Well, that makes sense,” you might say, “it’s a matter of loyalty.” In fact, the root of partisan bias is deeper.

fMRI studies showed what was happening in the brains of the biased voters. “Westen realized the voters weren’t using their reasoning faculties to analyze the facts; they were using reason to preserve their partisan certainty. And then, once the subjects had arrived at a favorable interpretation of the evidence, blithely excusing the contradictions of their chosen candidate, they activated the internal reward circuits in their brains and experienced a rush of pleasurable emotion. Self-delusion, in other words, felt really good. ‘Essentially, it appears as if partisans twirl the cognitive kaleidoscope until they get the conclusions they want,’ Westin says, ‘and then they get massively reinforced for it, with the elimination of negative emotional states and activation of positive ones.’”

In short, we are hard-wired for self-delusion and partisan bias. As Lehrer goes on to say: “… rationality actually becomes a liability, since it allows us to justify practically any belief. The prefrontal cortex is turned into an information filter, a way to block out disagreeable points of view.”

Clear thinking and sound decision-making requires that we be aware of and counter our natural inclination to partisan bias.

Tags: , , ,
Posted in All blog posts, Consensus-building, Decision-making | Comments Off

Status Quo Bias

Monday, March 29th, 2010


Often, when making difficult decisions, we choose what is familiar and reject novelty. We favor the status quo because it is “within our comfort zone.” This is a natural human tendency. However, new research reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences demonstrates that effective decision makers need to beware of the potential pitfalls of “status quo bias.”

The research construct was simple. Participants watched a video monitor displaying a tennis match. On cue, they were asked to decide whether a tennis ball was “in” or “out.” In each case, there was a default option, either “in” or “out.” So, when making a judgment, participants could select the default option or choose to over rule it. Results demonstrated that there was clear bias toward the status quo (i.e., the default option) and that this bias resulted in errors in judgment. “This bias toward default acceptance was seen in 13 of 16 subjects and importantly resulted in suboptimal choice behavior.”

The study authors observe that when “faced with a complex decision, people tend to accept the status quo, as reflected in the old adage, ‘When in doubt, do nothing.’ Indeed, across a range of everyday decisions, such as whether to move house or trade in a car…there is a considerable tendency to maintain the status quo and refrain from acting.”

Effective decision-making requires that we be aware of status quo bias, the “suboptimal acceptance of a default choice option.” To avoid this bias and to ensure optimal decision-making, an effective problem solver will diverge to generate all possible options and then converge with a clear set of criteria to select the best from among them. For simple strategies to do so, see these additional blog posts: Solution Webs and The Matrix.

Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in All blog posts, Decision-making | Comments Off