The fascinating world of unconscious bias and development policy

Development. Poverty. Africa. These are just three words on a page – almost no information at all – but how many realities did our readers just conjure? And how many thoughts filled the spaces in-between? Cover yourselves. Your biases are showing.

In the last few decades, groundbreaking work by psychologists and behavioural economists has exposed unconscious biases in the way we think. And as the World Bank’s 2015 World Development Report points out, development professionals are not immune to these biases. There is a real possibility that seemingly unbiased and well-intentioned development professionals are capable of making consequential mistakes, with significant impacts upon the lives of others, namely the poor. The problem arises when mindsets are just that – set.

Systems of thinking

As the work of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky has shown, development professionals – like people generally – have two systems of thinking; the automatic and the deliberative. For the automatic, instead of performing complex rational calculations every time we need to make a decision, much of our thinking relies on pre-existing mental models and shortcuts. These are based on assumptions we create throughout our lives and that stem from our experiences and education. More often than not, these mental models are incomplete and shortcuts can lead us down the wrong path. Thinking automatically then becomes thinking harmfully.

So what can be done? Awareness and acknowledgment of these problems must be followed by carefully-designed mechanisms and measures for counteracting these unthoughtful thought patterns. In other words, we need to combat this unintentionalism with intentionalism. But how? There is, perhaps, no system more explicitly dedicated to the business of (re)shaping mindsets than the educational system. This seems like the best place to begin trying to tackle this issue.

Underpinnings of behaviour

Take the four cognitive biases (pdf), identified by the World Development Report, which have surfaced from recent findings on the psychological and social underpinnings of behaviour:

• Thin simplification – when the number of policy options increases, the ability of people to evaluate them decreases critically, leading to greater influence of framing effects for the sake of simplification. In other words, the more options with which people are presented, the harder it becomes to make a decision and the more susceptible they are to being influenced by information – depending on how that information is presented.
  
• Confirmation bias – when individuals selectively gather (or give differential weight to) certain information in order to support a previously held belief.
  
• Sunk cost bias – when individuals tend to continue a project once an initial investment is made, and stopping a project would mean acknowledging that previously-allocated resources have been wasted.
  
• The influence of context – when development practitioners do not fully understand the mindset and circumstances of those they are trying to help and fill the gaps with their own assumptions and perceptions.
  

If we take the issue of thin simplification, it is evident that when dealing with complex issues and problems development agencies often apply standardised management tools and certain uniform approaches. But this behaviour discourages the kind of regular re-examination of the underlying assumptions about problems that a constantly evolving world necessitates.

To combat this bias, development professionals need to learn how to identify a problem correctly, perhaps by working in a space where all assumptions and perspectives can be heard and challenged. This should be followed by the creation of a set of manageable goals with “small wins” that contribute to the overall solution.

Classrooms should be stressing collaborative techniques for identifying problems and thinking them through. In Columbia University’s development practice lab, for example, students are taught to create problem trees and then turn them into solution trees, before they work through how interventions might be measured and evaluated. In the course of 16 labs, high priority skills in the field of development are experimented and piloted in real world contexts to enhance the role of practice.

What about confirmation bias? Placing students into situations in which they are exposed to multiple and divergent viewpoints, large data sets, and new information and communication technology, forces them to produce the best versions of their arguments. When this is done in groups, it provides the social pressure to debate in an articulate and compelling way. For instance, orchestrating intentionally adversarial setups, known as “red teaming”, through role play or by introducing people with different viewpoints, prompts perspective shifts.

The battle of the sunk cost bias is one of changing attitudes. Under the watchful eye of donors, there is a pressure to not recognise failure. It might not be covered up, but failure is not broadcast or shared alongside best practices, where such stories might actually be useful. While most people would agree that failure is part of life, there seems to be a pretence that the development world should somehow be immune, that colourful vignettes of successful projects should be shared the widest. Acknowledging that resources have been wasted – even if that decision means redirecting them towards programmes and projects where they could make a real and positive impact – is seen as something to be ashamed of.

Educational programmes and respected instructors might fight this notion by setting the example of openly discussing failures in their own work, as well as what they gleaned from these failures. As Einstein once observed: “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results.” If we are only sharing the successful half of what we are doing (and half may be a generous estimate), we allow the entire unsuccessful half to repeat itself, without caveat. How can we expect different results when there is a culture of hiding some of them? It’s time to restore sense, not perpetuate insanity.

Lastly, we come to context. There urgently needs to be a recognition of the two-way street whereby mindsets not only shape poverty, but where poverty shapes mindsets. The manner in which development practitioners perceive the poor and their problems greatly affects how development interventions are created, implemented and assessed. Too often, solutions are designed by people who do not share or understand the cultural norms, dispositions, history, or mindsets of the people they seek to serve.

Intelligence training

Immersion programmes are useful for practitioners to walk a mile in the shoes of the poor, internalise their problems, and motivate more contextually driven solutions – though they may be time intensive and require significant travel resources. However, this kind of social and emotional intelligence training in an institutional system that seems to place a pre-eminence on conventional intelligence (IQ) is arguably worth the investment. Educational programmes should therefore make it their priority to sponsor their students to travel and work in developing country settings for a set period of time, as is done at Columbia’s summer placement programme at the School of International and Public Affairs’ masters in development practice.

The educational system can be a powerful lever of change for building the support systems needed to tackle the unconscious biases development professionals face while addressing monumental global development challenges. With three billion people, nearly half the world’s population, living on less than $2.50 (£1.90) per day, the case is urgent. It’s time to rethink the way we think.

André Corrêa d’Almeida is professor of the Development Practice Lab, Columbia University. Amanda Sue Grossi is serving as a United Nations Association summer scholar fellow with Plan International Senegal.