Bursting Your Bios Bobble: We need our biases, but we also need to recognize when they are holding us back.

• Author: Stedron, Curt
• Position: TOOLBOX

Let's begin with a short bias quiz:

1. What day comes after Saturday?

2. What is the first month of the year?

3. How many fingers do you have on one hand?

4. Name a vegetable.

If, like most people, your answer to No. 4 was "carrot," then behold the power of our biases--our automatic judgments--to lock in on a truth without even thinking.

In recent years, individuals and organizations alike have focused on the ways cognitive biases can impact decision-making. This investigation is particularly useful for the legislature, a complex institution where individual and collective biases shape policies and procedures in often unseen ways.

Bias is a predisposition toward a particular truth or belief, like an invisible thumb tilting a scale in one direction. But it's important to note that bias is a tendency, not a certainty. Biases might cause us to lean one way, but that inclination can be reversed. So while you may have a bias toward action films, that doesn't mean you can't sit sobbing through the end of "Marley & Me." It's a tendency, not a life sentence.

Helpful Shortcuts

But why do we have biases in the first place? A better question might be, why do we need biases? Because biases are a feature, not a bug, of our brains. Here's why: The brain processes 11 million bits of information per second, but we are consciously aware of only 40 bits at any time. To help us deal with that much unconscious information, our brains look for shortcuts, the easiest being to sort data into categories: This is good, this is bad; this is safe, this is unsafe.

Imagine primitive man hearing a rustle in the tall grass. By the time all the possibilities were processed--maybe it's a bird; maybe it's the wind; maybe it's a rodent--a lion could have had a nice snack. Biases allow our brains to make quick decisions. Apply that idea to a legislative setting and the benefits of biases become clear. There is simply not enough time to process all the issues, facts, data, perspectives and personalities that constantly bombard us. Biases let us quickly make sense of things and facilitate decision-making. The problem comes when we...