What is a social cognitive bias?

From where we are sitting, intelligence is easy and cognitive bias is hard.

When an analyst joins the profession, they might believe that 95% of the effort is in collecting and analyzing the intelligence itself–trying to get the right answer from the best information, at all costs. That proportion is very distorted. In our projects, at least half of the effort goes into dissemination of the intelligence to the decision maker in a way that it isn’t rejected before it has value to the customer. The science of intelligence might be in collection and distillation of implications, but the art is in the delivery to human beings.

Social Biases

One category of cognitive bias is called social bias, because it refers to the intellectual distortions that result from the fact that our organizations are comprised of human beings who tend to stick together in groups. Information that we use and share is judged by each individual in a group, and also by the group as a whole. In other words, something isn’t a “good idea” until the majority of the group decides that the idea is good.

Intelligence analysts need to be aware of when the conclusions in an intelligence product might be attacked for reasons of social bias rather than assessed based on the merit of the analysis.

Example: “Just World Bias”

Let us take for example one social bias identified by psychological researchers, “Just World Bias.”

Just World Bias is the belief that the state of the world is the result of a fair and functioning system–especially our own position within it.

And example of Just World Bias might arise when examining the mortgage market of the mid- to late-2000s, when the price of real estate assets became disconnected from wages and began responding to markets’ taste for derivative financial products and foreign investment.

On a practical level, people who were already in the housing market were buoyed by the influx of offshore capital and rapidly increasing asset values. People who were not yet in the market found that the value of their labor was falling compared to those with existing debt structures and inherited wealth. When the mortgage bubble popped in 2008, those who got in the market late, or not at all, were disadvantaged compared to those who had risen along with asset prices, perchance to upgrade to a larger home within their means, possibly resolving their consumer debt load along the way.

Imagine that you were a successful executive in a sector of the economy other than finance in 2007. Chances are, you were not just recently entering the housing market. You were more likely than not on the positive side of those trades. Moreover, the market was zero-sum rather than a rising tide lifting all boats; you may have been profiting at the expense of someone else’s misery.

This situation would be apt to produce Just World Bias. After all, a hard-working executive in the corporate world in 2007-2010 would likely have been the product of many years of institutional education (high school, university, etc.) as well as many years in the workplace. If they socked away money to invest in a down payment, that is a sign of financial responsibility. And the fiscal policies and banking regulations of the United States are well above that person’s pay grade. Asking such an executive to look at the implications of the corrupt mortgage crisis would potentially invite them to see their own position in society as the product of corruption. Just World Bias invites individuals to downplay the likelihood or seriousness of a certain event because to look at it honestly might result in feeling as if they are being judged for being responsible for the injustice.

From an empirical point of view, the mortgage market on the 2000s was grotesquely unfair; a bunch of bankers robbed the world blind, made the U.S. Federal Government pick up the tab, made hundreds of thousands of people suddenly homeless–and they got bonuses on top of that. Many individuals not at the top of casino-like banks also benefitted–whether or not they intentionally defrauded their neighbors. Nevertheless, an analysis of the market dynamic could lead to individuals feeling insecure about what it says about their role in society.

Thus, professional intelligence analysts would need to be aware of the potential for Just World Bias when presenting intelligence products to decision makers.