We have tendencies to see things in one way or another. And that's about all sorts of things. That can be about serious personal issues; it can be about trivial things. Often the way in which *something is framed to us can actually create a bias* as well. A classic example, and there are various ways you can do this, is what's called *anchoring*. So, if we're asked something and given something that *suggests a value*,
even if it's told that it's just there for guesswork purposes or something, it tends to hold us and move where we see our estimate. So, you ask somebody, "How high is the Eiffel Tower?" You might have a vague idea that it's big, but you probably don't know exactly how high. You might ask one set of people and give them a scale and say, "Put it on this scale; just draw a cross where you think on this scale from 250 meters high to 2,500 meters high.
How high on that scale?" And people put crosses on the scale – you can see where they were, or put a number. But alternatively, you might give people – instead of having a scale of 250 meters to 2,500 meters, you might give them a scale between 50 meters and 500 meters. Now, actually, the Eiffel Tower falls on *both* of those scales; the actual height is around 300 meters. But what you find is people don't know the answer; given the larger, higher scale, they will tend to put something that is larger and higher,
even though they're told it's just a scale. And actually, on the larger scale, it should be right at the bottom. Here, it should be about two-thirds of the way up the scale. But what happens is you, by framing it with big numbers, people tend to guess a bigger number. If you frame it with smaller numbers, people guess a smaller number. They're anchored by the nature of the way the question is posed. So, how might you get away from some of this fixation? We'll talk about some other things later,
other ways later. But one of the ways to actually *break* some of this bias and this fixation is to *deliberately mix things up*. So, what you might do is, say, you're given the problem of *building* the Eiffel Tower. And the Eiffel Tower I said is about 300 meters tall, so about 1,000 feet tall. So, you might think, "Oh crumbs, how are we going to build this?" So, one thing you might do is say, "Imagine instead of being
300 meters tall, it was just 3 meters tall. How would I go about building it, then?" And you might think, "Well, I'd build a big, perhaps a scaffolding, or 30 meters tall – I might build a scaffolding and just hoist things up to the top." So, then you say, "Well, OK, can I build a scaffolding at 300 meters; does that make sense?" Alternatively, you might say, "Perhaps it's 300,000 *miles* tall, basically reaching as high as the Moon. How might I build it, then?" Well, there's no way you're going to hoist things up a scaffold.
All the workers at the top would have no oxygen because they'd be up above the atmosphere. So, you might then think about hoisting it up from the bottom, building the top first, hoisting the whole thing up; building the next layer; hoisting the whole thing up; building the next layer – you know – like jacking a car and then sticking bits underneath. So, by just thinking of a *completely different* scale, you start to think of different kinds of solutions. It forces you out of that fixation. You might just swap things around. I mean, this works quite well if you're worried
that you're using some sort of racial or gender bias; you just swap the genders of the people involved in the story or swap their ethnic background, and often the way you look at the story differently might tell you something about some of the biases you bring to it. In politics, if you hear a statement from a politician and you either react positively or negatively to it, it might be worth just thinking what you'd imagine if that statement
came from the mouth of another politician, that was of a different persuasion; how would you read it then? And it's not that you change your views drastically by doing this, but it helps you to perhaps expose why you view these things differently. And some of that might be valid reasons; sometimes, you might think, "Actually, I need to rethink some of the ways I'm working."