What are your biases? (Keep Asking Course Lesson)

Remember when I said I was designing a course?

Well, I’m in the thick of things now with 11 lessons complete and I’ve set a goal to have the rest of the course complete by January 2024.

Every time I talk about it with someone, I get even more excited about its potential.

The short pitch for it is this:

As you finish high school and go to college, you don’t need more advice—you need more asking. By this time, you’ve already been given plenty of advice, tools, and frameworks, and now you need to use them. This class will give you the time you don’t have anywhere else in your life—to ask yourself the important questions and search for your own answers.

I’m structuring the lessons so that each lesson covers a single question. This week, I’m sharing the lesson built around the question, “what are your biases?” You’ll notice I write like it’s a script but I tend to be a little more free flowing in the moment when I teach but the scripting is a helpful way for me to imagine the lesson unfolding as I prepare.

Give it a look and let me know how you’d feel about participating in this lesson or having your child participate in something like this.

ACTIVITY: Musical Hiring (20 minutes)

Let’s start with a little game.

I’m going to play 15-20 seconds of different songs and I want you to listen and think about one question. 

What type of person listens to this type of music? I’m looking for any descriptors that come to mind.

• Drake

• Zac Brown Band

• Respighi

• Nirvana

• Taylor Swift

• My Shot

• How Far I’ll Go

Turn to a partner and explain why you chose some of the descriptors you chose.

Each of you did something to create these profiles of the listeners called “thin-slicing.” Malcolm Gladwell talks about this in his book, Blink. Thin slicing is the ability to use limited information from a very narrow period of experience to come to a conclusion. You may have had an experience with someone who listened to these different types of music that has shaped the way you think of all listeners. For right now, we’re not going to label this process good or bad—it just is. And it’s important to acknowledge we do it. 

Let’s look at this a little more closely.

You are the hiring manager at a prestigious law firm. You’ve got a full day of interviews ahead of you and let’s imagine for the sake of this example that all of the candidates are essentially the same. They are all skilled, capable, seem like they would fit well, and have strong references. The only difference that actually stands out is the music you heard them listening to just before coming in for their interview.

Let’s try something.

Who would you hire—the person who listens to: 

• Drake or Nirvana?

• Resphigi or Taylor Swift?

• Zac Brown or How Far I’ll go?

Why did you choose the people you chose?

Why does this even matter?

I love this quote from Fyodor Dostoyevsky, "Every man has reminiscences which he would not tell to everyone but only his friends. He has other matters in his mind which he would not reveal even to his friends, but only to himself, and that in secret. But there are other things which a man is afraid to tell even to himself, and every decent man has a number of such things stored away in his mind." 

This is what we’re going to talk about today. It’s this idea that there are some things we share with the world, there are things we share with those close to us, there are things we keep to ourselves, and then there is this deeper layer of things we may not even fully recognize in ourselves just yet.

We’re talking about bias today. 

“People who are cognitively busy are also more likely to make selfish choices, use sexist language, and make superficial judgments in social situations.”

(Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow)

I love this quote from Nobel Prize economist Daniel Kahneman. And interestingly, SAS overall is home to this exact type of person. We run around engaged in lots of great challenging work that keeps our minds constantly processing. And it’s this high degree of continual processing that makes us even more vulnerable to bias, which makes today’s conversation even more important.

And I want to start by naming the fact that bias has a bit of a negative connotation to it but we need to reframe that. Bias simply is. It exists in all of us to varying degrees and this has been shown through a number of peer reviewed studies. It’s an established fact so there’s no sense in denying it simply because we don’t want to be associated with something “negative.” 

If you’ve taken a psychology or sociology class before, you’re likely familiar with the variety of different possible biases you may employ. But let’s take a few minutes to remind ourselves of these biases and to look at which ones seem to occur most frequently in our lives. 

ACTIVITY: Name it to Tame it (30 minutes)

I’ve got a list of a variety of different biases we encounter regularly with a very short description attached to each one. These come out of a group called, The Decision Lab. There are others not on this list and this is really just a high level overview of these. The point of this activity is to go through the list and identify 3 biases you think you use regularly. 

• Read the list.

• Select three.

• Write down a specific story that demonstrates when you have seen this bias in action in your life.

ACTIVITY: Pair/Share (10 minutes)

With a partner do the following:

• share one of the biases you noted and the story that helped you spot the bias in action in your own life

• Discuss one way you think you can decrease the impact of this bias in your life

ACTIVITY: Final Question Reflection (10 minutes)

You will notice that at the end of each lesson, I’m going to ask you to do more reflection. Specifically, I want you to consider the question we focused on during that class. Today’s question was “what are your biases?” The questions we will cover in here are rich and we could dedicate way more time to them so this is your chance to dig a little deeper. I’ll offer several possible prompts you might respond to or you can choose your own.

• How might this question, “what are your biases?” help you in the future?

• When might you use this question again?

• What else is worth considering about this question that we did not cover today?

ACTIVITY: Feedback (5 minutes)

This course was created specifically for you at this stage of life as you prepare for a significant transition and a series of major life decisions. It’s meant to give you questions that help you understand yourself and others better. At the end of each class I’ll give you a notecard and all I want you do is give me one piece of advice for the next time I give this lesson. It could be something as simple as, I really liked this one part, or please don’t do this or say this the next time you teach this lesson. That’s it, just one piece of advice for me. You don’t need to sign your name to it, but I take feedback very seriously because I want to do better so please give me something that will help make this lesson better for the next person who sits in your seat.

INVITATION: Observe

Pay attention to your interactions with others, the work you do, how you respond when feeling stressed over the next few days and look for where your biases begin to show up.

---

What do you think? Good to talk about biases? Do you have better activities you’ve seen or done? Would it have helped you to understand your biases as you entered your 20s?

Let me know!

Keep Asking,

Kyle