Many, many moons ago, when I was a fresh-faced graduate with a chunk of student debt to pay off, I worked for a while in a nursing home. It was a rather grand, if somewhat faded country home that had been repurposed to cater to the needs of the elderly clients who lived there.
Many of them also lived with age-related medical conditions. These included, but were not limited to, physical disability, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, dementia and arthritis. In most cases, they were not isolated but overlapped.
At 20 years of age, my prefrontal cortex had not yet fully developed, but oh my word, had my ageism fully flourished? Yes. It had.
I assumed that Margaret, who talked to the flies in the lunch hall had always been dithery. Catherine, who had lost her sight and used a wheelchair had never been any other way. Henryk, who had forgotten how to talk and once got lost in a broom cupboard was no more than a silent caricature of himself.
What I didn’t know back then is that things are not always as they seem.
The anchoring bias that led my younger self to pigeonhole my elderly friends is an example of a mindbug. Dr. Mahzarin R. Banaji, a professor of psychology at Harvard University, and Anthony G. Greenwald wrote about these invisible operating scripts that can cause glitches in our mental matrix in their book Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People, (2013).
“Mindbugs are engrained patterns of thought that lead to errors in how we perceive, remember, reason, and make decisions,” they explain, taking the reader on a journey from the concrete, visual mindbugs that we openly own and acknowledge to those more deeply intertwined with the essence of the self.
No one minds admitting that they see a blue & black dress instead of gold & white dress, or two cups instead of a face, but to being biased towards one religion over another, or gender, or perish the thought, race? That’s a whole different kettle of fish.
Banaji and Greenwald’s logic is impeccable, however. By starting with low stakes optical illusions, which irrefutably prove that things are not always what they seem, they guide the reader towards a reconciliation of sorts between the idealised self they so want to be, and the mindbug-ridden self that they are. To mindbug is human. To outsmart the mindbug is divine.
Lived experience is perhaps the easiest way to outsmart mindbugs and realise the biases behind erroneous perceptions or reasoning. However, it is not often (or desirable) for a person to live such an eye-opening life. One example of bringing awareness to blindspots used by Banaji and Greenwald is that of America’s symphony orchestras. In the 1970’s, fewer than 10 percent of symphony musicians were women, and the selection committees were concerned about this and other biases that were inherent in the audition process.
The solution that they came up with was simple and elegant. They placed a screen between the committee and the candidates, and voila! Over the next 20 years, the proportion of women hired increased to 40 percent.
Blind hiring is now common at the early stages of recruiting to ensure equitable hiring, but beyond that, for me the important take away is not the solution in itself, but the acknowledgment of the mindbug and the action taken to squish it.
Greenwald is also one of the co-creators of the Implicit Association Test, and has spent years refining it to test for a whole range of mindbugs. I suspect that I’m not the only one who has taken it more than once when the results revealed biases so deeply engrained, my conscious mind was unaware of them.
But then, that’s how it goes.
Interestingly, Banaji and Greenwald offer no hard and fast solutions for eradicating mindbugs. Being curious, learning where our own tendencies towards blindspots live, and neutralizing them as best we can seems to be the best we can do for now. But they are hopeful for the future.
Margaret, who talked to flies, had been honoured as a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) for her work in the medical field.
Catherine, who could not see and could not walk taught me that problems were best tackled by a two-hour stroll, preferably she said, along a clifftop, but then each to their own.
And Henryk, with his predilection for dark, quiet spaces, had been born in Poland and fought in WW2.
It’s been a long time since I’ve thought about these people, or worked in a nursing home. It’s certainly not the first time that I’ve realised that my thinking was faulty or skewed. Mindbugs, like bedbugs, are invisible until we become aware of them. The imperative to eliminate them is thankfully, equally strong.
In this, then, we are all equal. Mindbugs are as universal as gut bacteria; a bit gross when you think too long and hard about them, but a necessary part of being human in the world. From the Southern Capital to the grand old house that was a nursing home in Dorset, from wherever and whenever you hail, those little critters are present, subtly guiding our thoughts and actions.
Whilst no single solution is at hand, bringing awareness and working to neutralise our mindbugs is a step in the right direction. And then we keep walking, one step at a time.
Banaji and Greenwald begin their book with an observation from Emily Dickinson, one that is both pragmatic and hopeful when navigating blindspots between seeming and being. “The sailor cannot see the North- but knows the Needle can”.
