Trusting the wrong people

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/29/smarter-living/unconscious-bias-trust.html

By Tim Herrera
April 29, 2018

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Our unconscious biases are the shortcuts our brains take to reach certain conclusions. For example, when you see a completely empty subway car, your brain might assume it’s empty for a reason and send you rushing to the next one. In general, these mental leaps are essential: Imagine if you had to analyze every single sensory stimulus your brain took in, then base decisions off those analyses.

There’s a darker side of this process, however: Certain cultural biases can become encoded in our brains without our even knowing, leading us to draw conclusions that can be inaccurate, incomplete or sometimes harmful.

For example, research has shown that in group-work settings, instead of determining whether a given person has genuine expertise we sometimes focus on proxies of expertise — the traits and habits we associate, and often conflate, with expertise. That means qualities such as confidence, extroversion and how much someone talks can outweigh demonstrated knowledge when analyzing whether a person is an expert.

In other words, your brain can instinctively trust people simply because they sound as if they know what they’re talking about.

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Learn to catch yourself and take a step back when you notice that you’re going along with people who only feel authoritative — either because they project confidence or dominate the conversation — and ask yourself whether they truly are trustworthy. Do they have the credentials to back up their claims? Do they talk their way around specific questions rather than address them head-on? (Khalil calls this strategy “if-then plans”: If you catch yourself gravitating toward someone extroverted and loud, then seek another opinion.)

Two other sound strategies are ideas we’ve covered before in this newsletter. First, relentlessly seek outside input — oftentimes that can be as simple as asking a friend, “Is my trust misplaced here?” Second, never stop learning, because the more knowledgeable you are about something, the more likely you are to know when someone’s faking it.

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