Beyond Our Biases

Understanding your thinking habits makes connecting with others easier

- Jopie De Beer

The world, as a global village, is becoming progressively more diverse. Whether the movement of people has to do with emigrants fleeing their country of origin or people who prefer to stay in a new environment, there is no doubt that societies and cultures are becoming more interwoven.

Within a multicultural context, even outside their country of origin, people seem to find it more comfortable and easier to socialise with those with whom they share values, history, language, habits and beliefs.

In exceedingly diverse societies like South Africa, deep divisions between groups may allow for a variety of thinking habits to develop about each other. To achieve the united country we have been striving for, we must be conscious of these habits and actively work to avoid them.

We all use thinking habits and biases to make decisionmaking easier. People seldom have all the facts, nor can they comprehend all the facts, even if they wanted to. Herbert Simon called this our ‘bounded rationality’. We like to think of ourselves as rational, but every one of us must rely on a wide range of assumptions to cope with the overwhelming complexity of day-to-day decisionmaking.