Simon

I very much doubt that David Dunning and Justin Kruger knew how famous they would become, although ironically it’s the internet, the very medium which has proved their theorem over and over again, which has popularised The Dunning-Kruger Effect. You’ve probably heard of it.

Put simply, it’s an updated version of the aphorism that ‘A little knowledge is a dangerous thing’. It suggests that people who only have very limited knowledge of a subject know so little about it that they don’t understand how little they know. We can see it in effect on radio call-ins and TV vox pops: people who are very certain about things they know very little about. And the other side of the effect is that people who know a lot about a subject are often less certain about it than the people who know very little. William Butler Yeats put it much more eloquently in The Second Coming:

The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

The Dunning-Kruger Effect is an example of bias. In short, whether by accident or design, humans are communitarians, and because we often don’t have the time to analyse every situation we often trust what everyone around us thinks or what our leaders tell us. It’s very, very hard for us to believe something that is going to make enemies of our friends and family, or is going to get us kicked out of our group. At the moment the Trump administration is testing the limits of this loyalty, but so far the vast majority of the President’s supporters are proving just how hard it is to overcome bias. In these circumstances, our whole nervous system is attuned to only one kind of discernment: is this idea or behaviour going to get me into trouble with my tribe? Discernment of things like truth and what we might call God’s will or God’s calling is almost impossible.

Jesus seems to have been aware of this danger when he said that we need to attend to the log in our own eye before we try to remove the speck from the eye of another. Jesus used hyperbole a lot in his teaching, and I wonder if the size of the log in his parable indicates the level of blindness that our biases inflict on us. You would think that a log in our eye would be noticeable, but Jesus says no, it’s something that’s so innate that he needs to point it out.

One of the aims of this collective is good disagreement. It would be my observation that bad disagreement often comes about when one or more parties in a conversation deny that they have any biases at all. Whether it is God, politics or how to stack a dishwasher, they are absolutely sure that they have perfect knowledge of their subject, and their conversation partners are the ones that are biased, or stupid, or perhaps even evil. So I want to start this conversation with two questions for everyone:

How do you attend to your own biases?

Have you ever had success in helping another person see their biases?

How do you attend to your own biases?

Craig

Those are great questions Simon – so good that I’ve had to dig pretty deeply to even begin to answer them! 

I had a pretty traumatic accident a few months ago and have been sleeping badly. My dreams have been full of incredibly violent imagery, and I’ve been woken up by some very accusing thoughts. The most frequent of these is the fact that I don’t have many close friends, and those I have been close to I’ve not kept up with. As I lie awake trying to get back to sleep I also recall many of those friendships that have ended because I resist tribalism and have refused to side with someone who demanded my loyal support. I hope I’m known as a kind person, and I’m most certainly open to other ideas and happy to admit when I’m wrong, but I’m not someone who will change an opinion just to avoid trouble.

I reflected on how this might be perceived in a presentation given at the Baptist Assembly a few years ago. You can view the short presentation on the videos section of our website, and in it I observe: “in our age, Jesus’ behaviour might be labelled autistic… autistic or authentic? It depends on your perspective.” 

I am fortunate to be in a relationship with someone who is just like me – in fact, even more so! We often refer together to a model known as The Johari Window, which recognises that there are areas in my life that both I and those I know well are completely aware of (maybe shared experiences and oft-told stories). There also exists a room which contains things I know about myself that I don’t share with others and another in which things others can see clearly but I don’t accept about myself can be placed. Finally there is a dark windowless room which is unknown to all of us, but may nevertheless contain powerful drives, biases and motivations. We talk together about the model because it is our aim to gradually understand and accept as much of ourselves and each other as we can.

I consider myself fortunate to be in such a relationship because I honestly think this is the time in my life when I am most able to discover and attend to my biases Simon. And it has taken the presence of someone else who is as committed to that process as I am to help me.

Dave

“…let us strip off every weight that slows us down, especially the sin that so easily trips us up. Let us run with endurance the race God has set before us. We do this by keeping our eyes on Jesus, the champion who initiates and perfects our faith.” Hebrews 12:1-2 NLT

I’m a little bit older than the other members of the Collective. I guess that means that I’ve had more time to accumulate a life-load of biases and prejudices. It also means that I’ve had time to shed some of those biases…and to discover a whole load of new ones. I’ve also realised that not all bias is bad…

As I’ve thought about Simon’s questions I’ve tried to build up a brief inventory of some of the biases I’ve laid aside and the reason I did so. To keep things brief I’ll write about just one example.

I found Craig’s introduction of the Johari window useful in this. I recently came across a similar approach in Kate Coleman’s excellent book on leadership, “Metamorph”. Coleman talks about three transformative questions that are helpful as we wrestle with personal awareness and the need for change:

· What do I know about myself that no-one else knows?

· What do others know about me that I may not know?

· What do I and others not know about myself that God alone knows?

Most of us have some level of self-awareness, and will quickly recognise the biases we hold in our lives. Hopefully we’ve also been gifted with friends or family who aren’t afraid to kindly point out our bias blind-spots, or others who will challenge us, perhaps not so kindly. Then, finally, we may have a relationship with a God who speaks into our lives and who is invested in us becoming more and more like Jesus (who also appears to have had some biases if my reading of the gospels is accurate [and not biased…]).

So, I grew up in a small Kentish town where there was a deep divide between Evangelicals and Catholics (in much the same way as the Jews had no dealings with Samaritans in John 4:9). The evangelicals banded together separately from the Council of Churches (today known as Churches Together), because the Catholics were part of that. Some brave followers of Jesus tried to belong to both groupings which made things difficult for them. Some of these were people I admired and because of their example I never developed a deep seated bias against ‘the Catholics’.

Then I got to know some Catholics quite well, and even went to church with them (although I was shocked to find that I was excluded from bits of their worship). I discovered that despite what I’d been told they had Bible studies and even enjoyed charismatic worship! When I became part of the Northumbria Community (founded by an Anglican, a Baptist and a Catholic) I followed the same Rule of Life that the Catholic members did…we were, in the words of the Northumbria Community Charter, “covenanted together within the love of Christ”. Being covenanted together is pretty serious stuff.

As I became more interested in church history I discovered that faithful followers of Jesus were around for quite a few centuries before the Reformation. I was appalled at my ignorance and the ignorance of so many of my evangelical peers (another bias in the making!!).

Let me summarise this journey of stripping off a bias:

· I saw others modelling and not afraid to discuss a different viewpoint – EXAMPLE

· I got to know some of the people who I had previously been prejudiced against – RELATIONSHIP

· I did some checking into the history of my bias…I studied and pondered – EDUCATION

· I read about Jesus’ approach to bias and prejudice in his culture and times – SCRIPTURE

The opposite, I suspect, is also true. We may develop our biases because we pick them up second-hand (the curse of social media), by failing to do the hard work of finding out the other side of the story and when we do not know the ‘other’ who becomes the object of our bias.

I hinted earlier that I don’t believe that all biases are a bad thing and you could say that in the example I’ve used a negative bias became a positive one.

to be continued…