Post Boxes, Tennis Players, and Fighting Fires: Metaphors for Understanding Bias

As many of those who subscribe may recall, I often insert the term, or talk about Ecological Psychology. But to understand Ecological Psychology it might be helpful to also talk about Cognitive Psychology and how these two different schools of thought differ, and importantly how they inform leadership and HR practice.

First of all, I try not to get too invested in a right or wrong, all theories are just that, theories. But being upfront, I think there is a lot of unexplored potential in Ecological Psychology. Cognitive Psychology has taken us quite far, but it may have run out of RAM. Mainly because Cognitive Psychology has dominated psychology & popular science, so it is more mature in its state of research.  Much of this thinking has been inspired by email exchanges with Keith Davids & Luis Favela about the application of these two schools of thought to gender bias. Luis new book “ The Ecological Brain” is well worth a read for those really interested in the theory. The application of Ecological Psychology to areas such as gender bias are also still forming in my mind. So this is a little rough and a little more abstract than other posts.

I also apologise to the experts in both areas, as no doubt, I will misrepresent something. Please comment and I can incorporate any of these misrepresentations.

So, what is Cognitive Psychology? Cognitive Psychology looks to understand and explain behaviours, in this way it is no different to Psychology as a whole. But it does this via a cognitivist theory, which proposes the brain is like a computer. Specifically, that inside of the brain are representations and it conducts computations on top of these representations….huh?

Let’s use an example- If you have a letter to post, then a red post box is just a series of light waves hitting the retina. Those light waves are processed and a representation of a post box is formed, the size of the slot and the size of the letter are computed to understand if the letter fits. The memory of the postal service is accessed in the long term memory and shuffled to the working memory and a commutation is made that out of 50 letters posted last year, only one got lost, so it’s reliable. All of this is then processed into a mechanical action and sent to the body to carry out.  

This cognitivist approach is embedded in the advanced western world as it has grown up with the mid 20^th Century boom in computers. Computers used to be humans in a room doing calculations, until people such as Turing automated and mechanised these human computers. Since then, the computer has proven to be a great representation of the brain, and the brain has proven to be a great representation of a computer. This is seen all over pop culture- The Matrix & Avatar are both based on the brain being disconnected from the body and computations processed with actions sent back down the connection.

Makes sense right? That is how brains work. Well this is one theory and it works pretty well at explaining things, it is a useful model. But as Luis Favela writes in the fore-mentioned book, like Maverick in Top Gun, Cognitivism is writing a few cheques it cannot yet cash. It cannot yet fully explain things such as meaning & intelligence. Cognitivism has written cheques out against these two explanations to explain other things, but it has yet been able to cash out these two elements. So it is still just a theory, no matter how many times someone says left or right sided brain thinking…..

So how does Ecological Psychology differ? Ecological Psychology does away with representations and computations by explaining perception as direct. For instance, when you have a letter, the post box affords you posting it, your intention (a pre-determined action) informs your attention and perception. If you don’t have a letter but are running past a post box, it affords you putting a hand on it to take a breather. These are not computations but direct perceptions. In this out of breath running example your attention is drawn towards the sturdiness and upright nature that affords leaning. Not the aperture of the opening that affords posting a letter. These characteristics are directly perceived by the unique energy formations in the light waves. These affordances are always there, but your intention directs your perception, which directly informs invitations to act.

Direct perception is one explanation of why Firefighters recall not comparing different options when making decisions, but acting on their perception directly, they directly and accurately perceived what actions were afforded, and action was directly coupled. There is lots of evidence that expert tennis players attune to different things then amateur players. This is born out in Goal Keepers too. They are attuning to information sources that afford the right actions. They are not just processing the ball trajectory faster or have superior built up computations through repeating techniques.

Brining me back to the original though on gender bias. Much of gender bias interventions are based on the understanding that the bias is in the post perception information processing. We (re) educate these post perception computations. Ecological Psychology would argue it is not about (re) education of post perception computations, but the (re) education of attention. As what we attend to is what we perceive, and our actions are coupled to perceptions. Like an expert Tennis player, how do we re-direct our attention to afford different actions and behaviours.

How might further research in the (re)education of attention over computations afford us new ways bringing equity into the workforce. What if we could re(educate) attention that attunes people to different affordances, that guide different behaviours. This small difference in theories affords researchers new avenues to investigate and for practitioners to build interventions around. Areas such as Social Affordances offer us a new way to explore the environment people are in beyond the physical one.

Next time, just think about your intention and what you are attuning too and how does what you are paying attention to affect how you behave?