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By Jefferson Flanders

Thinking clearly requires clear sight.

Seeing clearly is the ability to see things are they are, to overcome your own misperceptions or preconceived notions (what social scientists call cognitive bias) when you are called upon to think through a challenging problem or to make a decision.

Seeing clearly involves perception; despite following the rules of logic, if you start with a distorted perspective—with an obscured or narrowed vision—you may arrive at a flawed conclusion.

The dangers of distorted vision have been recognized for centuries, from the apostle Paul in his First Epistle to the Corinthians (“For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.”) to Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman and their 20th century Nobel Prize winning work on human cognition. Tversky and Kahneman found that humans fall prey to common cognitive biases and often employ mental shortcuts (or to use an academic term, heuristics) and oversimplify decision-making. Not surprisingly, English is filled with phrases that describe our tendency to faulty perception: blinkered vision, intellectual blindness, shortsighted solution, myopic thinking, clouded focus.

It’s easy to find recent examples in the public and private arena where clear thinking has been short-circuited by faulty vision. Consider these:

• Western intelligence agencies became so convinced that Saddam Hussein and the Iraqi military had weapons of mass destruction that they focused narrowly on the evidence supporting that interpretation, excluding other possibilities. Their flawed assessments set the stage for war in 2003.

• Executives at Polaroid Corporation believed that instant photography would never be challenged by the new digital means of making images; by relying on outdated perceptions of consumer preferences, they failed to respond to the digital challenge and doomed Polaroid to eventual bankruptcy.

• After the destruction of the space shuttle Columbia, an investigative board concluded that NASA management had regarded debris damage to the shuttle at take-off (from falling protective foam) as an acceptable risk. While some engineers had calculated a higher probability of catastrophic failure, NASA managers perceived the level of risk to be lower, based on the historical record, and this reliance on past performance, the board found, led to the disaster.

These examples highlight the dangers of bias: the intelligence analysts were blinded by confirmation bias, gravitating to evidence that confirmed their WMD suspicions and discarding that which didn’t; the Polaroid executives, confident that they had a superior technology embraced by customers, remained oblivious to their own egocentric thinking; the NASA managers fell prey to overconfidence and optimism—the Columbia had made 27 successful flights before its fatal launch in 2003.

There are many barriers to clear thinking, including our hard-coded reliance on mental models, or mindsets, to make sense of the world; our entrenched attitudes and prejudices; the impact of whatever emotional baggage we carry; and the limits of the way we process information (for example, engineers often think in more linear, cause-and-effect terms; those in the life sciences lean towards systems thinking). Further, recent research shows that “objectivity is in the eye of the beholder”—people quickly detect a wide variety of biases in others, but are less ready to acknowledge and accept their own biases.

Seeing clearly

How can we guard against distorted vision? Fortunately, both experience and research suggests that we can distance ourselves enough from our mental shortcuts and cognitive biases to see clearly. In turn, that helps us think clearly. (Princeton psychology professor Susan T. Fiske, for one, argues that we can “moderate even unconscious prejudice.”) Here are five ways we can begin to see more clearly.

1. Recognize that we are vulnerable to bias. Self-assessment and self-reflection are necessary. For those with an ideological bent, or who hold strong partisan political views, it’s especially important to remember what we’ve learned about human cognition and our tendency to develop mindsets. Our reasoning can be influenced by our biases; consequently, our thinking can be incomplete, hasty, and self-serving. Just the simple act of reflecting about our own biases can help in mitigating them.

2. Challenge our premises, assumptions, inferences, and conclusions. This often proves hard for successful individuals and institutions to do, witness Polaroid and NASA. Some organizations have created formal systems to challenge conventional thinking, recognizing the negative influence of peer pressure and institutional conformity. The Roman Catholic Church, for example, appoints a Devil’s Advocate to marshal evidence and to make the case against those nominated for sainthood. The Vatican has realized it needs to offset the tendency for groupthink in choosing its saints!

3. Consider other points of view and alternative interpretations. Richard Paul and Linda Elder, experts in the field, have written, “Critical thinkers strive to adopt a point of view that is fair to others, even to opposing points of view.” Nothing exposes flaws in thinking faster than the critique of those who disagree; however, you must be willing to hear their criticism.

   Looking at multiple theories or hypotheses is also healthy. The Central Intelligence Agency has experimented with a technique called “Analysis of Competing Hypotheses” (ACH), where multiple plausible hypotheses are tested against available information. Former CIA officer Richards Heuer has argued that rigorously employing an ACH approach might have surfaced flaws in the intelligence community’s consensus that Iraqi possessed WMD.



4. Explain our premises, assumptions, inferences, how we reached our conclusions, and where confident judgments can’t be made. This sort of transparency about process encourages others to review, question, and test what has been advanced, often raising valid issues that might have otherwise gone unexplored.

5. Treat conclusions as provisional and subject to change if the underlying information (premises) and assumptions change. This approach borrows from the scientific method, in part, where (as the editors of Scientific American have noted) “[e]verything that science ‘knows,’ even the most mundane facts and long-established theories, is subject to reexamination as new information comes in. The latest ideas and data are the most provisional of all.”

There is a bit of a balancing act required for clear sight. On the one hand we must address intellectual challenges with openness—to attempt to “see things new.” Yet informed curiosity is also called for, knowing enough about a subject to ask intelligent questions. The trick is not to let what you already know and believe crowd out fresh insight. The ideal is “experience simulating ignorance,” in the words of scholar and media critic James Carey, cultivating that vital “innocent eye” without abandoning the necessary skepticism that is at the heart of clear thinking.

Jefferson Flanders is an author, educator and independent journalist. He blogs on issues of the day at Neither Red nor Blue.

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Copyright © 2007 Jefferson Flanders

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