Blindspots, biases, and transformative good

I don't consider myself consciously biased. But it is our subconscious or implicit biases that affect our ability to be impartial, subjective, and dare I see--effective decision makers.

Hurling toward a book deadline (this week-gasp) I am finishing up the section on writing survey questions. If you have ever written a survey--you get it. We don't want to lead the respondent toward a particular answer with our choice of words when writing the questions.

​As luck would have it, my research led me to Manzarin Banaji, a social psychologist and scientist--and an eye-opening discussion about our implicit biases.
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​The emerging science of implicit bias is one of the most promising fields for animating the human change that makes social change possible. The social psychologist Mahzarin Banaji is one of its primary architects. She understands the mind as a “difference-seeking machine” that helps us order and navigate the overwhelming complexity of reality. But this gift also creates blind spots and biases, as we fill in what we don’t know with the limits of what we do know. This is science that takes our grappling with difference out of the realm of guilt, and into the realm of transformative good.

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Here is the part that I found the most interesting. Dr Banaji and her team created an Implicit Association Test where you can uncover potential biases.

I highly recommend you take the time to take the test. It only takes about 10 minutes and let's just say--I was surprised at my results with  Gender - Science revealing a strong automatic association of male with career and female with family.

​You can gain more insights in her book Blind Spot: Hidden Biases of Good People

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There are a variety of topics to explore (race, gender, politics, religion, weight--the stuff you don't typically discuss at cocktail parties) and once we are aware of our biases--we are in a better decision to consider them when we quickly reach an opinion or hasty conclusion based on limited inputs or information.

This is the last week to pre-order Write Better Surveys. Period. Grab the book early and get a code for a free course on survey design--automatically. Find the code on the last page of the book.

The print version should follow in a few weeks, if you aren't an e-reader sort of person.

Thoughtful discussions about content development and outcomes analytics that apply the principles and frameworks of health policy and economics to persistent and perplexing health and health care problems...