Unlocking the Science of Bias: Mastering Self-Leadership and Cognitive Awareness

Neuroscience Meets Social and Emotional Learning

Welcome back to Season 12 of the Neuroscience Meets Social and Emotional Learning Podcast, where we bridge the gap between neuroscience and emotional intelligence to enhance well-being and productivity. In this episode, host Andrea Samadhi continues the 18-week self-leadership series, focusing on the neuroscience of biases as explored in Grant Bosnick's book, "Tailored Approaches to Self-Leadership."

Episode 347 delves into Chapter 16, examining cognitive biases through the lens of current neuroscience research. With insights from past episodes and experts like Jenny Woo and Howard Rankin, Andrea highlights the nearly 200 cognitive biases that influence our decision-making. The episode introduces Bosnick's strategies for identifying and managing these biases using Daniel Kahneman's dual-system theory of thinking.

Listeners will learn practical steps to recognize biases, categorize them, and apply thoughtful approaches to mitigate their effects. This exploration aims to enhance self-awareness and improve decision-making processes by leveraging both reflexive and reflective thinking systems.

Join us on this enlightening journey to understand the intricacies of human cognition and prepare for upcoming discussions, including the neuroscience of trust. This episode is a valuable resource for anyone seeking to refine their self-leadership skills and cognitive understanding.

On today's EPISODE #347 “The Neuroscience of Biases” we will cover:

✔ A review of past episodes where we covered biases.

✔ Chapter 16 of Grant Bosnick’s Tailored Approaches to Self-Leadership on The Neuroscience of Bias.

✔ A review of our two types of thinking (X-system=reflexive/automatic and C-system=reflective/intentional).

✔ 3 Steps to Understand and Manage our Biases

✔ 4 Strategies for Mitigating our Biases

For Today, EPISODE #347, we are moving on to Chapter 16, reviewing “The Neuroscience Biases” that we first covered on EP 17[i] with Harvard Researcher, Jenny Woo. On this early episode on our podcast, I mentioned I had just learned that there “are almost 200 known cognitive biases and distortions that cause us to think and act irrationally.” (72 Amazing Brain Facts by Deane Alban). Then we explored cognitive biases even further with EP 146 with our FIRST interview with Howard Rankin, on “How Not to Think”[ii] where he explains why "the more we know, the more we realize we know nothing at all." (Howard Rankin).

If you’ve taken the leadership self-assessment[iii], look to see if Biases (in Pathway 6, our final pathway in this book study) along with relationships/authenticity, trust and empathy is of a low, medium or high priority for you to focus on this year. I was not surprised to see this pathway is a high area of focus for me. I remember being surprised at how many common problems occur with our human thinking process, and wondered how to be aware of all of these cognitive biases. Learning is a continual process, and awareness that our thinking contains these biases, is the first step towards improving our thinking process.

So what does Grant Bosnick have to say about biases in chapter 16 of his book, Tailored Approaches to Self-Leadership? He opens the chapter with an exercise that came from Daniel Kahneman’s book, Thinking Fast, and Slow[iv] a book that sold more than 2.6 million copies.

IMAGE CREDIT: (Ch 16, Biases, Bosnick).

If you are listening to this episode, look at the image in the show notes, and don’t forget how you went on to solve this puzzle. Read the instructions and then solve the puzzle. It says “spot the error.”

We will come back to the solution at the end of this episode.

Bosnick next goes on to define what cognitive biases are, reminding us they are “mental shortcuts that allow us to quickly sort, categorize and make decisions on pieces of information in order to navigate the world in an efficient way. They can be positive, negative or neutral, although most of us probably associate them with the more negative side.” (Ch 16, Biases, Bosnick). Biases Bosnick says “can be conscious” like when you can relate to someone who is similar to you, or they can be “unconscious: we all have them and unknowingly use them to make judgements every day.” (Ch 16, Biases, Bosnick).

We did learn from Howard Rankin, that we need to be “careful about how we think” and Bosnick agrees, saying that biases can impact the quality of our thinking, judgements and decisions. (And Bosnick’s advice to us is that) in order to make better judgements and reduce bias, label the biases and mitigate them using appropriate mental and behavioral processes” (Ch 16, Biases, Bosnick) that we will examine today.

So What is the Neuroscience of Bias?

Bosnick brings us back to the two systems in our brain that we first saw on EP #345[v] “The Neuroscience of Relationships and Authenticity” where we looked at the neuroscience of our social brain with the famous story of Phineas Gage, Neuroscience’s Most Famous Patient. With this example, Bosnick tells us that “we have two systems in our brain: the X-system and the C-system. The X-system (or reflexive system) is automatic, responsive, like/dislike, reward/threat. Since this part of our brain is non-thinking, it’s not affected by our mental load.

The C-system (or reflective system) is controlled, conscious, with executive function and executive control.” (Chapter 15, Bosnick, Page 186). Motivation and effort are required to engage this part of the brain, and it can be affected by our mental load.

X-system (reflexive)=automatic

C-system (reflective) =we need motivation and effort to activate

Remember: Phineas Gage destroyed his C-system (system 2, reflective system) when the iron railroad rod went through his brain, (his controlled thinking was impacted) so he was left operating on X-system only. In other words, he had no control over his automatic, reflexive system, and his behavior became unbearable as a result. He treated everybody as an object for his own personal reward” (Chapter 15, Bosnick, Page 186) without control.

So, going back to the neuroscience of bias, the X-System is where we think on auto-pilot (like Phineas Gage) and is “fast-thinking” (Ch 16, Biases, Bosnick, Page 193) and the C-System is “the more deliberate, slow-thinking, reflective system…and is much more demanging on our cognitive resources than the X-system.” (Ch 16, Biases, Bosnick, Page 193). Which means, it’s easy to go to automatic reflexive thinking, and much harder to think with our reflective, “high road” intentional and controlled thinking.” Bosnick reminds us that we can’t operate with System 2 all of the time, or we will burn out. We need some automatic thinking to navigate our world.

We all know this. We’ve heard of productivity hacks, like what Steve Jobs did to make life easier by wearing the same clothes all the time. He said this reduced his cognitive load by eliminating the small decisions he had to make. He was putting the load of this small task thinking on his X-reflexive system, to make more space for his C-Reflective system.

Now that we know how our brain operates, going back to these two systems of thinking, Bosnick asks us to think back to the problems he listed at the start of the chapter to see how we went about solving them. I gave one of the two examples of the maze, saying to “spot the error.”

How did YOU solve this puzzle? I’ll tell you what I did? I started looking at the maze, and was looking for where the maze had errors. I couldn’t see any, so figured there was more to what I was looking at than I was seeing. Bosnick shares that the error is in the center of the maze where the instructions say “find the the error.” So I learned that while writing this episode, I’m cognitively busy and reverted back to my X-reflexive system to scan the diagram, and see if I could find the most obvious, easy to spot error.

If I thought this way with this example, where else am I reverting back either consciously, or unconsciously to automatic thinking?

Bosnick’s chapter goes on to explore three out of the almost 200 known biases, and concludes his chapter on ways to manage these biases. He says that “biases are a natural part of the human condition. We cannot get rid of them. Therefore we need to understand them, and manage them.” (Ch 16, Biases, Bosnick, Page 193).

He suggests these 3 Steps for Understanding and Managing our Biases:

Accept and admit we are all biased. It’s a natural part of being human. The exercise from Daniel Kahnaman’s book showed me how quickly I reverted back to system x, reflexive, automatic thinking. This self-awareness has helped me to consider where else I make quick judgments, without thinking reflectively. Label the Bias. While Bosnick covered three examples, similarity bias (making quick conclusions about people similar to you), urgency bias (where we put non-urgent tasks on hold to push through to do something that requires our immediate attention), or experience bias (where we believe our perception is the truth and that others who see things differently from us are wrong, knowing there are close to 200 different biases, it’s a start to be aware that our thinking could possibly be flawed. Mitigate the Bias. We aren’t going to solve all of our biases at once, but once we are aware that’s it’s human to have them, we can begin with looking at strategies to mitigate each.

4 Strategies for Mitigating Biases:

SLOW DOWN: Bosnick goes into detail on how to mitigate the top three biases that he listed. The strategy that he used was to step back, slow down and access your Systems 2 reflective thinking to see what you notice. The maze exercise showed me I could benefit from slowing down my thinking and not jump to conclusions. BE MINDFUL: When talking to others, work on “engaging our System 2 thinking…the more mindful we are, the more we can engage our mental brakes, increase self-awareness, reduce emotional impulses, and reduce our susceptibility to unconscious bias.” (Ch 16, Biases, Bosnick, Page 212). Being mindful of others will help us to learn to appreciate different perspectives, as well, other people will connect more to us when they can sense we are thinking from their point of view. LEARN FROM OTHER PEOPLE: Talk to others so you can learn “how to get out of our own experience bias and appreciate other people’s perspectives. This will help us to get out of our autopilot, easy route thinking of the urgency bias to have deeper, more robust and deliberate thinking.” (Ch 16, Biases, Bosnick, Page 212). ASK FOR OUTSIDE OPINIONS: Find others you can brainstorm with to come up with fresh ideas to help you to think in a different way. Ask for feedback to gain a new perspective. This is just the beginning of this topic for us here on the podcast. While writing this episode, I had a message from our good friend Horacio Sanchez, third time returning guest from EP 111[vi] who let me know he is releasing a book on this exact topic, coming out March, 2025. We will have him back on for a 4th time, to dive deeper into this topic.

REVIEW AND CONCLUSION

To review and conclude this week’s episode #347 on “The Neuroscience of Bias” we covered:

✔ A review of past episodes where we first talked about biases.

✔ Chapter 16 of Grant Bosnick’s Tailored Approaches to Self-Leadership on The Neuroscience of Bias.

✔ A review of our two types of thinking (X-system=reflexive/automatic and C-system=reflective/intentional).

✔ 3 Steps to Understand and Manage our Biases

✔ 4 Strategies for Mitigating our Biases

This is just the beginning, knowing there are close to 200 known cognitive biases that cause us to think and act irrationally, I know that I’m looking forward to learning more on this topic from Horacio Sanchez, whose forthcoming book will cover this topic.

In the mean time, I’m working on ways to slow my thinking down, and hope that you have found it helpful to take a closer look at how we think.

With that thought, I’ll see you next time, with the Neuroscience of Trust.

Have a great week!

REFERENCES:

[i]Neuroscience Meets Social and Emotional Learning Podcast EPISODE #17 with Harvard Researcher, Jenny Woo https://andreasamadi.podbean.com/e/harvard-researcher-jenny-woo-on-the-latest-research-brain-facts-and-myths-growth-mindset-memory-and-cognitive-biases/

[ii]Neuroscience Meets Social and Emotional Learning Podcast EPISODE #146 with Howard Rankin on “How Not to Think” https://andreasamadi.podbean.com/e/expert-in-psychology-cognitive-neuroscience-and-neurotechnology-howard-rankin-phd-on-how-not-to-think/

[iii] Self-Assessment for Grant Bosnick’s book https://www.selfleadershipassessment.com/

[iv] Daniel Kahneman, Thinking Fast and Slow October 25, 2011

[v] Neuroscience Meets Social and Emotional Learning Podcast EPISODE #345 on “The Neuroscience of Relationships and Authenticity” #17https://andreasamadi.podbean.com/e/unlocking-authenticity-the-neuroscience-of-relationships/

[vi] Neuroscience Meets Social and Emotional Learning Podcast EPISODE #111 with Horacio Sanchez https://andreasamadi.podbean.com/e/resiliency-expert-and-author-horacio-sanchez-on-finding-solutions-to-the-poverty-problem/