WE’RE NOT (QUITE) AS GOOD AS WE BELIEVE
Ninety-three percent of us believe that we are above average drivers. Of course that is not statistically possible but it is the wonderful thing about being human, persistently experiencing a world in which we are above average.
Another great thing about being human is that we get to create our own reality. As David Robson points out in his excellent book, The Expectation Effect, we see and experience what we expect to see and experience. In other words, rather than experiencing an objective reality, our brain takes in loads of data and molds it into a reality that aligns with our mindset, our beliefs our past experiences, and our expectations. And in doing so, it creates for us, reality.
This makes the world a much easier place to navigate, but it does also have some downsides. One downside is that very often it makes us worse at communicating with other people.
But first, back to the superiority bias that most of us experience. It’s rare that I meet someone who does not believe they are an excellent communicator.
Were I to gist the introductions most people give at the beginning of my courses it would be “I’m already really good at this, but I thought maybe I could pick up a tip or two.” Many of them (and you the readers) probably are better than average communicators, but still there remains more improvement to be found than just on the margins because in certain situations our brains tend to get in the way of our natural talents and makes us worse communicators.
While I shouldn’t find it surprising that most people see themselves as good communicators, even in challenging situations, I am, yet, still am surprised. From my perspective, interpersonal communication is the hardest thing we do as humans. We can’t see inside other people’s minds to know what they are thinking, feeling and experiencing and we only get a rough glimpse inside our own minds. That does not bode well for effective communication.
While our brain creates a reality for us, we experience things as objective. That is, we are almost completely unaware of the matrix our brain is creating for us and truly believe we are perceiving objective reality. In fact, each of us tends to believe that we alone are experiencing reality as it truly is. That we are not affected by our past experiences, our beliefs or expectations…though we do believe everyone else is.
This is known as Naïve Realism bias. As one writer put it, we consistently experience the world as if we are the one individual in a flock of sheep. And we get frustrated and ultimately judgmental when we realize the sheep are not experiencing the same reality as we are and do not hold the same beliefs as we do. How can they be so ignorant and flawed as to not perceive obvious reality?
Imagine having a conversation with someone who holds different political views from your own. How are they not seeing that the solution to homelessness is really quite simple? Obviously they are biased by their political beliefs…while we are not.
This reaction (over which we generally do not have conscious control) leads us first to become less willing to seek understanding of their point of view, more likely to be defensive of our position, and more susceptible to attribution errors.
In this case, we are highly susceptible to fundamental attribution error, which is the perception that our views are the product of an objective view of the situation and context while the other person’s beliefs or behaviors are the result of some flawed aspect of their personality. They are too ignorant to see the obvious solution.
This leads to increased polarization and makes conversation with others who don’t completely share our viewpoints increasingly difficult. We see those who don’t agree with us as more extreme than they really are, and thus we become less and less likely to engage with them productively. As one recent paper found, “this precipitates a conflict spiral where both parties perceive the other as biased and proceed to respond in competitive ways to the reaction of the other.”
Unfortunately, we rationalize our competitive responses as being dispassionate and rational, rather than competitive.
Awareness of the bias does tend to help us control for it (and I’ll talk in a later post about other means of controlling for bias); yet we’re also stuck with the problem that part of the naïve realism bias is that we already believe we are not as susceptible to cognitive biases as everyone else, so overcoming it is a bit more challenging than you’d think.
Many of us are naturally good communicators but when communicating with those outside of our in-groups, things can go awry without our conscious awareness, making us not quite as great communicators as we believe. We can improve, and not just at the margins, but it does take some effort.
Stay tuned for more on this topic and if, in the interim, you’re interested in learning more about what I can do for you, check out my Pyxis Academy website.
