Unknown Biases

Making mistakes is a natural part of life. We all make them, no matter our age or experience level. However, according to the many successful minds and schools of thought, how people handle their mistakes separates successful people from those who struggle. Do they take responsibility for them or shift the blame onto others? Personally, I want to identify and know when I’m making excuses for my mistakes and learn how to stop putting blame.

Many scientific facts demonstrate that it is natural to want to protect our ego and avoid feeling embarrassed or ashamed. However, we know that blaming others prolongs the problem and prevents us from learning from our mistakes. It is essential to recognize that owning our mistakes is a sign of maturity and strength, not weakness. In addition, learning from our mistakes is how we grow and become better versions of ourselves and ultimately contribute better to society.

We all want to mature and take responsibility for our mistakes. I’m even confident that we all know that when we make mistakes, the following steps are how we own them and learn from these mistakes and grow.

We mostly know that we must be honest about our behavior. Sometimes, this will lead us to apologize if we hurt someone.

We learned not to make excuses for our mistakes at a young age. We know to take responsibility for our actions. We learned that taking responsibility can be uncomfortable but is an essential step towards personal growth, owning up to our mistakes and taking steps to rectify them. For example, if you say, “I’m too busy, and that is why I didn’t do a required task,” you can ask yourself if you could have prioritized differently or if you are using busyness as an excuse.

Lastly, I’m sure we all learned not to dwell on the past and that we need to move on, and the way to move on is to find a solution by identifying what you can do better to make things right.

It is all good to know the above steps. I’m sure these steps were the very first things we learned at a young age to help us navigate society. However, as we grew, these simple steps became harder to apply. Nevertheless, I found out through personal experience that most of the time, it is hard to even recognize when we are making excuses and putting blame.

Luckily, there is a growing body of research on the cognitive biases that underlie our tendency to make excuses for our mistakes and why we may not even recognize that we are making excuses. Here are some scientific facts that help explain why it is hard for humans to acknowledge when they are making excuses for their mistakes.

According to scientific discoveries, human beings have a confirmation bias that makes us seek out and interpret information confirming our existing beliefs and attitudes and ignore or discount information that contradicts our beliefs. This is usually said to view the world through one own lens. This behavior can lead to a distorted view of reality, where we only see evidence that supports our excuses and ignore evidence that challenges them. In a nutshell, we go blind when things don’t look familiar. We can even go into panic mode if something tends to challenge our beliefs.

Where I came from, we say that one who has not gone anywhere may think their mother cooks the best dishes. This statement is to say that we all have biases. The sooner we accept that we have biases, the better and ready we will be to accept the world as it is and keep an open mind to things and the people around us.

The above statement is a call to open our eyes and acknowledges that many are the occasion when we can become blind and don’t own up to our mistakes in the first place because we cannot even see them for what they are because of our biases.

Let me give you a silly example. A close friend of mine would not eat shellfish regardless of how appealing it looks. I had made fun of him for a long time before I realized I was making a mistake. My mistake here was that if this friend was not brought up in an area where shellfish were a thing, this does not make him enjoy other food any less.

It gets even worse when we add self-serving biases to these human’s tendency to attribute positive outcomes to our abilities and efforts while attributing negative outcomes to external factors beyond our control. This bias allows us to protect our self-esteem and avoid feelings of failure. The behavior can also make us make excuses for our mistakes rather than accept responsibility for them and learn from others.

I personally refer to this as a depriving pride. Remember the last time you thought you were better than someone because the other person didn’t act like you? This is what I’m talking about. I call this behavior depriving because we miss great opportunities to learn new things and new ways by falling prey to this behavior.

Many of us don’t realize that the world is evolving, that perhaps what we knew yesterday may have changed, and that we need to keep an open mind. Sadly, you may even meet people who claim to be open-minded but propose some idea that goes beyond what they have ever imagined, and they will fight you tooth and nail and try and prove you wrong without ever listening to you. If this happens to you, don’t worry about it. That is their loss. They missed an opportunity to learn something new.

Keep in mind that we humans experience discomfort when our beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors are inconsistent with one another. To reduce this discomfort, we tend to justify our behavior and thoughts to ourselves and others, even if they are not rational or accurate. This behavior makes us make excuses for our mistakes to maintain consistency with our self-image and beliefs.

Anchoring bias makes us rely too heavily on the first piece of information we receive when making judgments or decisions, even if the first piece of information is not accurate or relevant. This bias can lead us to anchor on an excuse or justification for our mistake and resist news or perspectives that challenge our first guess. It is okay to make mistakes if during a first decision-making phase, we were lacking enough information. However, it becomes a critical error when we later learn additional pieces of information but then refuse to take them into consideration because accepting the new information will prove that our previous decision was wrong.

This is where we need to improve. Please learn to recognize and avoid this behavior by baking new information into your lesson-learned machine and using it to make the next decision better. Refrain from disregarding new data because you are too afraid to be wrong today. Accept your current mistake and use this information to do better next time. Remember, there are no actual failures and only learning and improvement opportunities.

We can make matters worse by adding our emotional reasoning to the mix. We often base our beliefs and decisions on our emotions rather than on rational or objective evidence, which can lead us to make excuses for our mistakes based on how we feel rather than on the facts of the situation.

Recall the above example that I gave you of me and my friend. When I realized I was in the wrong, it felt awkward to apologize to him after being wrong for so many years. Of course, I doubled down. I just told myself that it was not worth bringing this up. Now I know, good. I can now stop making fun of him, and all is well. However, I’m sure you correctly guessed that I am still wrong here because I fail into the second trap of self-serving and anchoring biases.

The right thing in this situation was to apologize right when I came to this realization and let my friend let me know that he was fine and understood that I was just not well informed. The correct course of action is always to own up to our mistakes. Then bake the new information into the next decision by leveraging the lesson-learned approach.

The best way to own our mistakes is to apologize sincerely. A sincere apology involves:

• Acknowledging the harm caused by our actions.
• Taking responsibility for them.
• Expressing a commitment to making things right.

When we apologize sincerely, we demonstrate empathy and respect for others, which can go a long way toward repairing damaged relationships.

It is essential to recognize that we have way more biases than we are aware of, especially with the ever-changing world and the fact that the world has become a global village.

Previously, we were all in our little bubbles, and we shared the same biases with most of the people around us. Therefore, it was easy to understand each other. 

In the modern days, we are constantly on the move, crossing borders easily, yet we are still the same person with the same biases. When we cross borders, we don’t magically become a new person. We remain the same person with little knowledge picked up from where we have been.

To combat these biases, I’ve always learned to assume that I don’t know much and have many biases, many of which I may not even be aware of. When I meet a new person, I try my best to listen more, to let them educate me on their ways and beliefs. I take mental notes and cross reference the new information against my own beliefs. If anything does not register, I know to note the item as a possible bias of mine toward this person, so I seek further awareness on that specific subject so I can avoid the pitfall.

I recently learned that some Chinese regions don’t celebrate their 80th birthdays. Instead, these families will celebrate the 79th birthday as if it was the 80th, then skip the 80th and only talk about their age again once they turn 81. In Sought Korea and most East Asia cultures, there is mostly no 4th floor. Mind-blowing right? I learned these families don’t like to say the number 80 because, in some regions in China, 80 is pronounced similarly as the same word “to send a dead person off to their last resting place.” Also, Koreans and most East Asia don’t like to say or even attribute the number 4 to anything because it is pronounced the same way as death. Next time you hand a gift or something with the number 4 to an East Asia person and their face turns red. You know why.

Ultimately, my suggestion to you is to listen more often to the people you meet. If they are mature and have gone through any journey of learning the real world, not just what they teach us in schools, they will, in turn, allow you to tell them about your beliefs. When the individual gives you a turn to share, genuinely share your beliefs with them. However, if the person has yet to go through a level of maturing to seek the opportunity to learn, guess what? You know better to strive to be the adult in the room and know that this person may offend you soon because of these biases that they have but left unchecked and forgive them well in advance before they even alter a word.

Remember that the very definition of maturity is knowing that you don’t know. Accepting that you don’t know and seeking to learn proves that you know more than you take credit for. I’m very proud of you. Continue to be humble, embrace the world like a child, show kindness and gratitude like a master.