uxdesign.cc – User Experience Design — Medium | Flavio Lamenza

We all have cognitive bias, and I believe there is a way to dribble it (Messi style): being optimistic!

First of all, we need to understand what is “being optimistic”.

Here is the definition (from Cambridge Dictionary):
adjective: optimistic
1. Hopeful and confident about the future.
2. Someone who feels that good things are more likely to happen than bad things.
3. Someone who always believes that good things will happen

This definition is already amazing, but I would like to add one more, which I think will help add a lot to this article:

4. Someone who believes there is always a way out.

Second of all, we need to understand what is a cognitive bias:

This is from Michael Gazzaniga in his book “Cognitive Neuroscience. The Biology of the Mind”.

A cognitive bias is a systematic pattern that happens when individuals create, based on their perception of the world, their own “subjective social reality”. Thus, cognitive biases may sometimes lead to perceptual distortion, inaccurate judgment, illogical interpretation, or what is broadly called irrationality.

In 2015, Shana Lebowitz and Samantha Lee wrote this helpful article about the 20 cognitive biases that screw up your decisions.

One very silly, but interesting example to understand this better:

A father posts the following picture on Reddit.

Source.

The title of this post is “My 2 years old pointed out the excavator ‘s scoop is backwards.”

In a nutshell he is biased to believe that all excavators have the scoop inwards (most likely happening with the excavator toy he bought to his kid). But he probably didn’t know that most scoops/shovels can turn outwards as well. He not only believed he was right, he was so 100% sure he was right, that he even posted and made fun of it.

It turns out, he didn’t know everything about it. So far he was only aware of the back-facing shovels and thought this was the only way possible. And he stopped there.

That’s when being optimistic plays out nicely and can help you to get rid of your biases. You can’t give yourself the luxury of stopping; you must think there is always a way out. If you want to post about back-facing shovels, think about and see if there aren’t any front-facing shovels first. If there aren’t any, hey… you could create one and even make a lot of money 😉

Shall we remember what happened to Kodak?

By 1976 Kodak accounted for 90% of film and 85% of camera sales in America. Until the 1990s it was regularly rated one of the world’s five most valuable brands.

What happened? They truly believed (biased) that 90% of market share was impossible to beat. Until someone (optimistic, I would guess) thought about it in a different way “Hey… what about digital cameras?” and you already know the rest of the story.

Last example: my son had a dream.

He is 6 years old and today he told me a story that blew my mind.

Thought this could be a good image for a dream 🙂

It was early in the morning, he had woken up and was on my bed lying beside me. I told him that in the middle of the night I saw him laughing while he was asleep, so I turned to him and asked:

Me — I saw you laughing while you were sleeping. Do you remember if you had any dreams?

Him — Yes, I was telling you to stop, you and Be (his brother) were tickling me, don’t you remember?

For a moment, It was creepy. What did he mean with “don’t you remember?”

Long story short: until today (6 full years), my son thought that every dream he had with another person meant that the other person was also dreaming HIS DREAM. It’s like a dream with WiFi.

He thought that if he was dreaming with me, it meant I was also dreaming with him… so our dreams would be connected and happening at the same time 🤯

The amazing learning experience for me is that he doesn’t know what he doesn’t know. No one ever talked about this with him, and he never bothered asking, because for him, this was the norm. I told him that dreams happen in each individual’s head only, he looked at me and absorbed that information.

What he did with the information, I don’t know. But now I know he has both of them in his head. And this is a good start, people should be aware that there is information out there.

By reading all this, do you reckon Plato’s Cave?

Plato has Socrates describe a group of people who have lived chained to the wall of a cave all of their lives, facing a blank wall. The people watch shadows projected on the wall from objects passing in front of a fire behind them, and give names to these shadows. The shadows are the prisoners’ reality. Socrates explains how the philosopher is like a prisoner who is freed from the cave and comes to understand that the shadows on the wall are not reality at all, for he can perceive the true form of reality rather than the manufactured reality that is the shadows seen by the prisoners. The inmates of this place do not even desire to leave their prison, for they know no better life. The prisoners manage to break their bonds one day, and discover that their reality was not what they thought it was.

Plato’s Allegory of the Cave — Learning Mind.

How many times this happen to us?

Were you ever “chained” to a reality that you thought was real?

Have you ever asked yourself how many things/actions you’ve been doing in the “auto” mode?

How can you even know if there is a different reality out there?

We are talking about something very deep here, which is growing up without an information and accepting reality as you think it is. How could the father of the excavator kid ever know about the outward facing shovel if he never bothered thinking about it (also, he probably couldn’t care less about it). Or how could my son think in a different way if we never spoke about it.

I believe that the best way is being optimistic about life and work. There is always a way out. Ask questions, lots of them. The reason is, you will start to hear about lots of different perspectives and lots of different realities. Being aware of all these experiences, perspectives and realities and accepting them as information is a good start to get rid of your biases.

Thank you for your time reading.

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Being optimistic might be the best way to get rid of your biases was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.