The Golden Age Of Biases: Weapons or Tools

The concept of bias encompasses a lot of today’s world attention and energy in connection to outing discriminatory and unfair social behaviors. You are biassed towards….you name it has become the mantra for describing and explaining bad, wrong or simply incorrect approaches to realities and people. The bias is a timely subject and a buzz word for the social and political reality we all awake to in the mornings.

But as with many concepts, we need ask ourselves, are biases bad by nature or by context?

Bias in the brain

Cognitive biases describe irrational errors in the process of decision making because we need shortcuts to process the information overload. Ironically, they lead to a distorted perception of reality, to inaccurate judgements, illogical interpretations and seemingly irrational conclusions. That is why many psychologists but also marketers state the counterintuitive: People are irrational.

But the catch is that the unpredictable and the irrational also follow patterns, thus are prone to manipulation.

Bias in society

The social biases appear in how we relate to the groups we feel we belong to and those we don't, how we perceive others as individuals from groups. Basically how we relate to the social fabric of our world at a sociopolitical and personal level.

And to add more steam to the fire, we then have the

Bias in the machine

The algorithms feed on predictable behaviour but they strive on biases because precisely error judgements bring engagement from the users, thus feeding the system more data. And this leads to a very dangerous animal, like an ouroboros, a snake endlessly feeding on its own tail: biases feed the algorithms, the algorithms feed the biases, all the while reasoning is left outside the circle.

The bias in the machine is being addressed: in 2021, IBM launched an open source programme to mitigate biases in advertising tools. Their argument is that advanced technologies (tracking, targeting, data driven dynamic systems) drive efficiency and accuracy, but they dangerously scale the biases, impacting and alienating audiences they were meant to serve. IBM together with other big corporations are pleading to find a solution to this vicious cycle and reduce biases in advertising.

So let's explore these devil’s tools in one example from the perspective of the advertising industry looking at their mirroring in the real world.

The Anchoring bias is what happens in our decision making process when we rely too heavily on the first and strongest information we perceive, tending to extrapolate it to secondary matters even though it does not really influence them.

In advertising, this explains our irrepressible habit of buying things we don't necessarily need, but they are new and shiny compared to previous items. This also explains why the price reductions work: we anchor our minds in the previous, higher cost and that influences how we perceive the reduced price (ignoring the true value for money). That is why we keep buying new, upgraded phones, even though we most probably make very little use of the upgraded features that bring the higher cost.

But an example of the anchoring bias in real life would be the following: numbers (maths) says that more crimes happen in poor neighbourhoods. We anchor our mind in this notion and the police decide to send more ground policemen in those neighbourhoods and tell them to expect trouble. But these tougher controls and policing make the community anxious and alienate them from the authority, which leads to social unrest and the cycle of violence continues.

So should or even can we use biases (more) ethically in real life and in advertising? Whoever finds the answer to this question will probably get a Nobel Prize. However, as professionals and individuals, we can at the very least be more aware of the ramifications of using these tools and of perpetuating them. Using biases as tools to predict and shape behaviours is natural when working for influencing perceptions, but not when it comes with such a high price tag. Biases are not bad in and of themselves, but some biases are more dangerous to tap into than others.

By Alexandra Florescu