Belief is bias

A few months ago I was talking to my therapist, John, about a decision I was wrestling with. “Why do I care about this?” I asked him.

John is in his 50’s, and is a Malibu Point local who holds a west coast title in longboarding. A significant chunk of our time is spent discussing the ways surfing makes us confront ourselves. Heavy conditions, cold water, crowds, aggressive surfers in the lineup, toothy sea creatures, and our own performances are a packed subway car of commuters bumping into our egos.

Novice surfers often wonder who gets the next wave in the lineup; experienced surfers do not. They know that there’s an encoded basket of rules that determines it (Kelly Slater explains it here for Wired), which is full of shared beliefs. John’s perspective on my moral question: “Belief creates bias.”

Tapping into a group that shares a belief can be radically powerful, as Marcus Collins writes in For The Culture:

People who share the same worldview are more inclined to act in concert with other members, not because they “love” the brand or politician but because the brand or politician is an extension of themselves. These brands, leaders, and organizations serve as a receipt of who we are, a badge of identity. We transfer meaning from the cultural world, fashion it into products and political affiliations, and ritualize them into our identity.

Beliefs function like norms. Norms are precedent. Precedent is sticky. But where does all this come from?

We like to think that our actions follow our beliefs but that’s not always the case. Social psychologists study cognitive dissonance — the uneasy feeling I had when I talked to John, which examines beliefs in actions in conflict. In the 1970s, a Stanford psychologist ran an experiment that randomly divided a group of male college students into guards and prisoners. Each group assumed the behaviors of the side they’d been assigned to.

Indeed, as soon as some of our prisoners were put in these uniforms, they began to walk and to sit differently, and to hold themselves differently.

The two-week experiment had to be ended after six days due to the “guards’” increasingly brutal behavior toward “prisoners.” People who share the same (assigned) worldview, acting in concert with other members.

It’s not hard to imagine other applications of subscribing to sets of beliefs. I’m a Dodgers fan and I always get some smug pleasure out of Giants fans chanting “Beat L.A.”. Politically motivated people adorn their bumpers and heads with the colors and slogans of causes they support, or against those they don’t. The evolution of encoded terms for not liking Joe Biden (“F-ck Joe Biden” → Let’s Go Brandon → FJB) is worth a study of its own. The message is clear: we are not those guys.

It makes me think about what marketing people believe about our slice of the universe.

Strategists have our own sets of beliefs. Differentiation vs. distinctiveness. Long vs. short. Digital vs. brand. Reach vs. targeting. We hold ours like a kitchen counter bowl’s aging fruits; some we should keep and some should definitely be thrown away.

Within agencies, strategists, creatives, and account people have beliefs, attitudes, and stereotypes about each other. We need these things so we have a shorthand for working with them (every strategist knows the pain of explaining our work to civilians, so we can imagine the agony of having to do it with every other member of an agency).

But the within-agency beliefs flip when we’re collectively talking about clients, who we treat with an entirely different basket of beliefs that all agency functions share. And of course, marketers have their own beliefs about what’s reasonable and realistic to expect from agencies.

We all believe that the next wave is ours.

We also have biases toward our own stories. I was talking to a friend who started as a designer and grew into a brand leader about our shared bias toward people who have a core skill. We recognized throughout the conversation that our view is “skill” is probably overly narrow. We started as prisoners and held those beliefs as our own.

This morning I was surfing alone in the middle of a long stretch of beach. Toward the end of my session, a lone surfer paddled out right next to me, a clear norm violation. I watched him get a couple waves and saw he was relatively novice, gave him some distance, and was a bit jealous that he was blissful devoid of my belief.

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I write these posts, 3-MINUTE MONDAYS, every other week. My goal with them is to share a snippet of insight into how to do strategy, build teams, and grow. Comment here or message me on LinkedIn if you want to chat. — Ben