I walked into the classroom with excitement and trepidation. This was my first class to teach as a Teaching Assistant – Introduction to Anthropology. I had my 4-year degree behind me and did better in my college studies than anyone from my High School years would have believed. I felt accomplished and an imposter all at the same time.
The students passed back the syllabus that I’d carefully prepared and I started to discuss the topics. They looked bored, but maybe it was the 8 AM hour and lack of coffee. After all, not a one of them had Anthropology as their major. To them it was a required elective supposed to be an easy A. Hopefully, my enthusiasm for the topics we would cover would get them interested too.
As I read through the highlights of the upcoming semester, one gentleman in the middle of the room stood up and said, “if you are going to teach evolution, I’m out of here.”
He promptly picked up his backpack and left. I stood in front of the classroom, quite shocked, took a deep breath and placed my hand on the podium next to me to steady myself. I knew, the next words I said would set the tone for the rest of the semester.
“I’m sorry your classmate will not stick around for the topic of evolution. However, I hope you find the study of anthropology an exercise in critical thinking. Yes, it is controversial, Science vs Religion. In this class, we will examine the theory of evolution from a scientific viewpoint. In science, we state a hypothesis and test it with available evidence. A theory is supported or not supported by evidence. As we gather evidence, we revise our hypothesis. We will examine the evidence, how it does or does not support the theory – every theory, not just evolution. If you take anything with you from this class, whether you enjoy the topics of different cultures, archaeology, physical anthropology, or linguistic anthropology, I hope you learn how to apply critical thinking to problems in your chosen profession. The study of anthropology will challenge your biases: race, marriage, what is culturally accepted behavior, even the language you use.
Up until now, school has basically been route memorization. In college, you begin to learn how to think, not just memorize. Some of you are going to be mechanical engineers, others are going into the medical profession, others in business or accounting. In those professions you need the knowledge provided by the classes in your major. You’ll never need to know what evolution is to succeed in your profession. But what you do need to know is how to problem solve regardless of the topic. You need to know how to think critically about topics, understand how to judge the data provided to you and make decisions based on that information. We will use the information provided by the study of anthropology to exercise that skill.”
Side note: I probably wasn’t that eloquent, but this is the gist of what I was trying to get across.
With that, I let them go (about 15 minutes into the first class), then shaking, climbed the stairs to the offices, to find my advisor and tell him what had happened. He just laughed. Ok, so I was over-reacting a bit. Who cares about one kid that got bent out of shape of the topic of evolution? What I didn’t understand was that one kid forced me to articulate why I had done so much better at the university level than I ever did in High School. For some strange reason, I like to challenge my pre-conceived ideas. To paraphrase Socrates, if I couldn’t examine a belief, it wasn’t worth believing.
It wasn’t until I had about 10 – 15 years of corporate employment behind me before I truly began to understand how our biases affect our lives from personal experience, not just as an intellectual exercise. Understanding your own biases can help you make better decisions. Recently, corporations have been providing cognitive bias training to minimize negative outcomes, improve performance, and prevent discrimination.
The recent problems faced by Boeing provide an example of poor decision making in corporations. I bet we’ll soon see Boeing in the examples for cognitive bias. With Boeing, we have employees saying the aircraft did not receive proper safety tests and management ignored their concerns, telling them to be quiet and not create delays. Management argues the aircraft are safe, have been painstakingly inspected and reworked to meet exact standards. The Senate has been holding hearings regarding the safety concerns. The questions we need to dig into are:
- Does management cut safety to be able to get a project done “on time and on budget”?
- Are the safety engineers being overly cautious?
- Which senators support the big corporation over public safety?
- Which senators are willing to cover up safety concerns to avoid reduced travel by the public over safety concerns?
The people making decisions around Boeing are doing so based on their own biases. If they do not know what their bias is and the impact of that bias on their decisions, We may not see any improvement in safety.
We all have unconscious biases, even if we think we are enlightened. In more recent years, I’ve taken classes in psychology. Psychologists are using implicit association tests to examine cognitive bias. These tests set up a scenario that measures the subject’s response time in making simple decisions. For example, the test could show a picture of a man and a picture of a woman, then under the man’s picture show the word “teacher” and under the woman’s picture show the word “mechanic”. The word “book” would flash and the subject needs to decide which word, teacher or mechanic, associates to the word “book”. If the word teacher is under the man’s picture, and it takes longer to associate the word book to teacher, then the subject displays an unconscious bias for the teacher to be a woman. The stereotype of women as teachers and men as mechanics makes the decision easy, while fighting the stereotype makes the association difficult. Thus, it takes a split second longer to press the right button.
You can take cognitive bias tests online. Project Implicit is a good site to try (https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/takeatest.html). Don’t be surprised by the results. It seems our biases run deeper than we know; the results show that stereotypes are still firmly rooted in our decision-making processes. Explicitly, I could say I know a woman can be as good a mechanic as a man, but implicitly I would choose a man to change my tire and balance my wheels.
If you would like to learn more about implicit bias and the impact on social discrimination, discrimination in the workplace or education, a good resource to start is the Implicit Bias Module Series from the Kirwan Institute at Ohio State University (https://kirwaninstitute.osu.edu/implicit-bias-module-series). An important point to remember is understanding bias is not about judging a person based on their bias. Bias is not necessarily good or bad. It’s about self-awareness. With self-awareness we can begin to overcome our implicit bias consciously.
To close, I’ll leave you with the results of the blind auditions in symphony orchestras. The following short youtube video is worth watching to understand the impact of implicit bias.
Great post! Early classes can be very difficult. I remembered my 7:30 a.m. chemistry classes; they were rough even with coffee. I think your point about bias is valid. In the case of Boeing, people thinking that they are too smart and perfect could be the cause, so bias is probably a factor.
Thanks Edward. TA’s get to teach the early classes. I usually walked in with lecture material in one hand and coffee in the other. I have a few other TA war stories for future posts. As for Boeing, the jury is still out, but it is sounding to me a lot like the Challenger explosion. That is the classic example in many of the Corporate Training on identifying cognitive bias in decision making. Like you said, the bias is folks who think they know what is going on and not paying attention. I worked for an IT company that developed software for airlines. We tested more than most IT houses. I had the conversation with new programers quite frequently — we test more because if we get it wrong, planes can fall out of the sky. There are some areas where you need to be overly cautious.
Absolutely! Bias and complacency are a dangerous combination.
Exellent post, on a very important issue. These days there is much talk of “cancel culture”, like it was something new, but a professor of mine in the University of Helsinki once told a story about a nother Finnish professor who was teaching economy in Harward in the 1980’s. He had a bunch of students refusing to attend lectures – any lectures – because he was going to, among other subjects, go through the Marx book Das Kapital. As if the students were so affraid of how strong the influence of the propaganda effect on them would be on mere critical reading and research on a single book? In effect those students flunked the course, but I have to wonder, if they came up with this nonsense by themselves, or had someone else planted this idea to their heads, like possibly in your example about evolution, and if so, were those, who fed this behaviour to these kids, actually more affraid of these kids learning critical thinking skils in general, than of the effect of learning something about evolution, or capitalism?
I think, that if we think we stand on solid ground on any issue, we are not affraid of a challenge to it. Also, if we -through such discussion, research, or other challenge- learn we have been wrong all along, we are better off realizing it sooner, than later.