The Network Garden

One of my favorite lines of thought is the role that biases play in how we interpret and respond to the world around us.

Case in point, I recently read a story that cited “doomsday statistics” that 50% of small businesses were unable to pay their rent.

Sounds ominous until you compare those numbers to the ACTUAL rent collections data, which shows that only ~10% of small businesses fail to pay their rent timely.

So how to explain the disparity in payment numbers?

The authors of the doomsday story had based their data on self-reported surveys, not actual transactional data.

This underscores the disparity between how people FEEL, what their stated INTENT is and what they actually DO.

This is the trap of false equivalency bias, equating feelings with behaviors, when the two are not always aligned.

We see false equivalency and false dichotomy leading some to destructive outcomes, such as reflexively quitting jobs, ending relationships or closing doors.

This is the tyranny of the all or none. Too often, we forget that two conflicting ideas can be true at the same time.

It’s a matter of framing.

Worse, our biases can lead us to anchor on specific data points and overweight their importance, blinding us to the basic truth that success in life, however you define it, is about learning to navigate a sea of paradoxes.

We see this repeatedly in the telling of breakout success stories pulled from the annals of business, celebrity and wealth.

“Such and such path did for me, therefore, it can do the same for you.”

Survivor bias leads us to ignore all of the entrepreneurs who followed the same steps, and did not succeed.

(The ending of Christopher Nolan’s ‘The Prestige’ delivers a delicious riff on this notion.)

They say history is written by the victors, meaning that success validates itself.

This is something we see in how the media reports stories, how politicians sell their policies and how the business giants craft marketing narratives that too often share little resemblance to their actual behavior.

Which gets me to the most pernicious of biases, which is the biases of self-interest over common good.

This is a tough one, because it’s so easy to understand why.

Though we try to be fair and reasoned, most of the time, people choose a path that conforms to their self-interest.

Moral of the story?

Never underestimate the ability of people to convince themselves of ANYTHING when their livelihood or well being depends upon it.

As an analog, I think back to the blue dress, gold dress meme from a few years ago, where some people saw the same dress as blue and black, while others saw it as gold and white.

The lesson here is don’t be surprised when others take the data you’ve given them to explain why a given truth is blue and black, and process that same data to confirm THEIR truth that it’s actually gold and white.

As always, remember that light is the best antiseptic…for blindness.