Unchecked Biases and My Wedding Cake Story

While planning our wedding, we went to several wedding cake tastings. My first choice was a cake filled with fresh blueberries, raspberries, and strawberries from a bakery for which I have had a fondness since childhood. Just before I placed the order for that cake, a close childhood friend warned me against it, advising me that the cake falls apart. I had never seen that particular cake fall apart and my friend said that it was a more recent development because the bakery had changed the recipe. Since I did not want our wedding cake to fall apart, I took my friend's advice and we went with our second choice, which was from a different bakery, which was more local to us.

Source: Melnikov Sergey/Shutterstock

Shortly after our wedding, while at a mixer, the topic of wedding cakes came up and I mentioned this story and the bakery by name. One of the people involved in our discussion responded that she was very familiar with that particular cake from that bakery and that the bakery has never changed its recipe. She said that she is a baker herself and that the reason the cake falls apart has to do with the fresh berries and the size of the cake. She explained that the larger the cake, the more it tends to fall apart.

I listened to her and heard and understood exactly what she was saying; however, I kept insisting that the bakery had changed the recipe and that the cake did not previously fall apart, regardless of its size.

As I was driving home from the event, it suddenly occurred to me that, while I had heard and understood what this woman was telling me about the cake, I was unwilling to take it into consideration because of my unchecked bias. Left unchecked, biases cause people to constrict and distort the information they receive, understand, and consider.

I was so disappointed in myself that after years of researching and writing about biases, their causes, their impact, and how to keep them in check to the extent possible, I had allowed my biases to impair my thought process on something so unimportant in my life as a cake. I realized that the bias stemmed from the credibility I gave to the information I received from my close childhood friend over conflicting information I received from someone I had just met. I would like to think that I have improved in that regard in the eight years since getting married, particularly since I have continued researching and writing about the topic of bias.

Nevertheless, my relationship with my close childhood friend was what Bill Eddy, LCSW, Esq. refers to as a peripheral route of persuasion (generally outside of conscious awareness). He distinguishes the peripheral route of persuasion from the central route of persuasion, which consists of facts, ideas, and reasoning. While I heard and understood facts, ideas, and reasoning from the woman I had just met, the central route of persuasion occurring unconsciously was such that I gave more credibility to my close childhood friend and the information she had conveyed to me. In other words, I found the conflicting information I received untrustworthy because I trusted my close childhood friend and there was no reason I could think of for her to have misinformed me.

Had I not recognized that I had allowed my biases to get in my way, I would not have had any reason to engage in reality-testing, especially since it was just a cake and had no bearing on my life. It turns out that the information the woman I met at the mixer conveyed was correct and that the information I received from my close childhood friend was inaccurate. Both of them were in agreement; however, that had we purchased that cake for our wedding, it likely would have fallen apart. We were very pleased with the wedding cake we selected, and this story is not about second thoughts, in that regard. This story is about biases and their impact.

I had accepted the information received from my close childhood friend as an objective, verifiable and unquestionable fact merely because of its source. I figured that my close childhood friend had no reason to mislead me about such a thing and I trusted her because of our relationship, so I had no reason to question that information.

This may seem harmless, but it isn't. I accepted incorrect information as factual and would have continued believing that information, acting upon it and conveying it to others as factual, had I not caught myself. I do not like to spread false and misleading information, nor do I like being willfully ignorant and self-righteous about it, which occurred when I stood my ground while engaged in that discussion at the mixer. I also demonstrated impaired thinking, all because of the impact the peripheral route of persuasion had on me merely because of my relationship with the source of the information.

My purpose in sharing this story is not to embarrass myself; rather, it is to demonstrate how easy it is for biases to impair our thinking, even on matters of little to no importance in our lives.

A great deal is said about the importance of perspective-taking, which is cognitive empathy. It is unquestionably important to listen to hear and understand other people's perspectives. However, cognitive empathy does not involve the skills of emotional self-awareness, which is defined as "knowing what one feels," and which happens to be the foundation of emotional intelligence, the skills of which are essential for reducing and otherwise keeping biases in check. Recent research found that therapists tend to have higher levels of cognitive empathy than non-therapists, and no noticeable difference when it comes to emotional empathy, which is an aspect of emotional intelligence. It should not be surprising that therapists tend to have higher levels of cognitive empathy, considering their training, licensure, and the nature of their work. That said, their higher than average level of cognitive empathy alone does not mean they are any more willing and able to give fair consideration to information that challenges their biases than anyone else, regardless of their ability to listen and hopefully understand the information they receive.

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In 2019, Esther Duflo, Abhijit Banerjee, and Michael Kremer won the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Memory of Alfred Nobel for their work that helped transform anti-poverty research and relief efforts. The following is an excerpt from an article by Duflo and Banerjee titled Economic Incentives Don’t Always Do What We Want Them To:

If it is not financial incentives, what else might people care about? The answer is something we know in our guts: status, dignity, social connections. Chief executives and top athletes are driven by the desire to win and be the best. The poor will walk away from social benefits if they come with being treated like a criminal. And among the middle class, the fear of losing their sense of who they are and their status in the local community can be an extraordinarily paralyzing force.

The trouble is that so much of America’s social policy has been shaped by three principles that ignore these facts; to fix it we need to start from there."

Duflo and Banerjee are referring to the reality that left unchecked, biases cause people to constrict and distort the information they receive, understand, and consider. The more constricted and distorted the information heard, understood, and considered, the more impaired people's thinking becomes.

Emotional intelligence involves a set of skills and abilities that have no relationship to people's IQ level, academic achievement, training, licensure, or certification. People can learn to think critically and still suffer from impaired critical thinking because they have failed to develop and hone the requisite skills associated with social and emotional learning, the very foundation of which is emotional self-awareness. Unfortunately, the skill of emotional self-awareness is developed by challenging one's biases, which involves gaining perspective through evidence that contradicts our beliefs and thereby causes us to experience discomfort. It might behoove us to keep this reality in mind, rather than banning social-emotional learning out of fear that it might "turn children into 'social justice activists.'"

Teaching children to think critically and not teaching them the skills needed to do so in an unimpaired manner, to the extent possible, is not helpful, unless that is the ultimate goal, which I certainly hope is not the case.