Meta‐Bias: a Practical Theory of Motivated Thinking for Educators Hunter Gehlbach [email protected]
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Running Head: META BIAS IN EDUCATION Meta‐bias: A practical theory of motivated thinking for educators Hunter Gehlbach [email protected] Christine Calderon Vriesema [email protected] Gevirtz Graduate School of Education #3113, University of California, Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara CA 93106-9490 Keywords: bias, motivated cognition, person perception, self, social perspective taking Acknowledgements This research was made possible in part by generous funding from the Robertson Foundation. Abstract As global challenges increasingly require cross‐cultural solutions, the need to train the current generation of students to more accurately discern the thoughts, feelings, and motivations of others escalates in importance. One approach to improving social perspective taking entails teaching students when and how bias impedes their efforts to “read” others. To facilitate this educational goal, we propose a theory of meta‐biases that unifies and distills the biases that frequently derail perspective taking attempts. Specifically, we argue that people primarily strive to be accurate in their attempts to read others. However, two competing motives often derail this core goal: a desire for cognitive efficiency and a need to protect and/or promote one’s sense of self. We organize a sample of person‐perception biases into these two “meta‐biases” for illustrative purposes. We hope the proposed theory helps educators more easily redress faulty attributions and seize teachable moments with their students. 1 Running Head: META BIAS IN EDUCATION Meta‐bias: A practical theory of motivated thinking for educators As the world becomes more global, people’s need to accurately read each other’s thoughts, feelings, and motivations increases in urgency. Simultaneously, the challenge of accurate person perception becomes more daunting. The problems today’s children will face— immigration, economic inequality, and climate change—require solutions not just within, but across borders. Thus, problem-solving efforts will require individuals from different backgrounds, who hold different values, and whose identities are shaped by distinct cultural forces to collaborate productively when the stakes are extremely high. These ingredients form an ideal recipe for individuals to misperceive one another. Barring the development of new educational approaches, biased perceptions of others seem likely to increase. Complementing this global need to improve students’ social perspective taking capacities, is a parallel, local need within educational contexts. In the United States for example, over 80% of teachers are White while the student body is now majority non-White (Egalite & Kisida, 2017; National Center for Educational Statistics, 2012). Because of the increasing dissimilarity between teachers’ and students’ backgrounds—not to mention the tremendous cognitive load that teaching requires—we might also anticipate a rising number of biased interpersonal perceptions. Various strands of research suggest that such biases may strain teacher-student relationships (e.g., Egalite & Kisida, 2017; Jussim & Eccles, 1992), which, in turn, may negatively affect a host of valued student outcomes (Brinkworth, McIntyre, Juraschek, & Gehlbach, online, 2017). Thus, the need to help students mitigate bias in their person perception attempts ranges from local educational environments to the global community. Yet, mitigating bias remains an especially vexing educational challenge regardless of the setting. One challenge results from the 2 Running Head: META BIAS IN EDUCATION sheer number of biases—they fill hundreds of pages of social psychology texts. Equally problematic is the entrenched nature of so many biases. Societal norms, expectations, and messages embed biases deeply within our social cognitions. Finally, because we frequently surround ourselves with like-minded individuals (Montoya, Horton, & Kirchner, 2008), others in our social milieu may subtly reinforce many of our biases to the point where we fail to notice their existence. So how can educators—whose plates are already over-full with curricular obligations— carve out bandwidth to address each of the vast array of potentially entrenched biases that can derail students’ social perspective taking capacities? How can students (or anyone for that matter), who are wrestling with the cognitive load of reading someone else’s thoughts and feelings, sift through the dozens of biases that might impact an interaction while still maintaining the interaction? How can researchers help practitioners predict which biases might emerge in a given educational setting given the number of biases, individual differences in susceptibility to different biases, and the seemingly infinite number of variables that might influence a school or classroom setting? In this article, we take a small, but important preliminary step towards tackling this problem of bias in our person perception attempts. Specifically, we explore the possibility that a guiding theory that unifies and distills the primary biases that affect our person perception attempts might help practitioners and scholars improve students’ person perception. By organizing and synthesizing the vast array of these biases into a good, practical theory (Lewin, 1951), educators can more easily recognize and redress faulty attributions as well as seize teachable moments with their students. If, indeed there is nothing so practical as a good theory, then our distillation of large families of biases into two “meta-biases” may also help researchers 3 Running Head: META BIAS IN EDUCATION realize opportunities to develop interventions, norms, or classroom practices that might improve students’ capacities to read others. ORIENTING CONTEXT In this article, we view biased person perception as a key element within the social perspective taking process. We conceptualize social perspective taking as a complex aptitude (Corno et al., 2002; Snow, 1996) and define it as a perceiver’s motivation and ability to discern the thoughts, feelings, motives, or point of view of one or more targets (Gehlbach, 2017; Gehlbach, Brinkworth, & Wang, 2012). The social perspective taking process can unfold in a host of different ways—perceivers might directly experience a target’s perspective or they might imagine it from a more distant third-person perspective (Gehlbach et al., 2015); they might engage in interpersonal perspective taking (trying to read a target while interacting) or might consider a target’s perspective during an academic exercise such as taking the perspective of a historical figure (Gehlbach, 2011); they might use different strategies for a perspective taking attempt, for example stereotyping versus projection (Ames, 2004b; Epley, Keysar, Van Boven, & Gilovich, 2004). Regardless of the approach to taking another’s perspective, from an educational perspective, we posit three primary pathways to improving the underlying aptitude. First, students might be motivated to simply engage in the process of taking others’ perspectives more frequently or put more effort into their perspective taking attempts (Gehlbach & Brinkworth, 2012). In other words, there may be ways to motivate students to “turn on” their social perspective taking ability more frequently across a greater number of situations. Second, educators might help students improve their underlying ability, e.g., by teaching them more effective perspective taking strategies (Gehlbach et al., 2012). Finally, if students could be 4 Running Head: META BIAS IN EDUCATION taught to identify and mitigate some of the biases that derail their perspective taking attempts, they might become more motivated and/or more accurate perceivers. In other words, even though their underlying motivation or ability might not improve, they might perform closer to their true capacity when their biases are subtracted out of the equation. Our article focuses on this third pathway to improving person perception attempts. Importantly, we presume that the biases that afflict the accuracy of our person perception attempts have emerged for a good reason. Lieberman (2013) notes that humans have evolved an entire portion of their brains primarily to facilitate our social interactions. Given this evolution, it seems unlikely that people would then undermine these developments and start making systematic mistakes in perceiving others with no ulterior purpose. Thus, we take the view that biases arise to fulfill a particular psychological need. For example, concluding that the audience’s furrowed brows during an academic job talk represented disagreement might be too unnerving for the speaker (especially in the middle of the talk). To ward off panic, the speaker might prefer to conclude that the audience is not only engaged, but concentrating deeply (thus, serving the purpose of allowing the speaker to navigate the remainder of the talk). Furthermore, we suspect that these biases persist, in part, because perceivers rarely obtain feedback on their social perspective taking attempts (Gehlbach, 2017). Academic speakers may continue to think that they won over the audience if nobody tells them otherwise. As outlined in the introduction, we motivate the need for an organizing theory of person- perception biases with the idea that we should prepare today’s youth to navigate cross-cultural interactions within a global society that will need to solve common problems. The fact that schools are fundamentally social (Gehlbach, 2010) with ample opportunities for interpersonal misunderstanding,