One night when I was a company officer, we had a fire alarm at a building on the university campus. We had responded to this building more than a dozen times in the past six months, and we knew that the alarm system was notoriously unreliable.
As a result, we had become fairly casual about alarms in that building. When we arrived at the large building that night, the campus police officer on the scene reinforced this attitude.
“Can’t find anything wrong,” he told us. “Can’t even find a detector going off. This system is screwed up.”
We nodded, making the dutiful walk up and down the maze of corridors on the first floor, where the alarm was showing. We knew that this part of the building was mostly labs, and that they did not have alarm sensors in them.
We were getting ready to go reset the alarm and leave, but it was a slow night and we decided to open a few doors, going through the motions of checking areas we knew from past experience had to be clear.
The first door we opened led predictably into a lab, with no detectors in it. But as we scanned through the crowded space, we saw a light on in the farthest back corner of the large room.
“What’s that?” I asked the police officer.
He shrugged. “I have no idea.”
“Is there another room back there?”
It seemed unlikely, but we walked back to check. When the officer unlocked the door, smoke poured out. We had ourselves a fire.
Confirmation bias
What we had fallen victim to that night was a cognitive trap called confirmation bias. This is a decision-making flaw that is defined as the tendency to notice and look for information that confirms one’s existing beliefs, while ignoring anything that contradicts those beliefs.
Making decisions based on similarity to past experience is not always a bad thing. In fact, a type of decision making that firefighters engage in all the time is recognition-primed decision making (more on this next month). This approach allows for quick decisions that are based on innate familiarity and logic arising from a kind of intuitive knowledge about a situation.
The risk of confirmation bias comes from the second part of the definition, the willingness to ignore anything that contradicts existing beliefs. This cognitive trap is a danger on emergency scenes, but can affect interpersonal relations as well.
Snap judgment
We tend to make judgments about people fairly quickly — how they dress, how they talk, where they are from. An experience that we have with someone will affect our expectations and interpretations of future experiences, for better or for worse.
When I was a new firefighter, an officer once told me, “The secret to success around here is to show up to work on time, try to get along with people, and don’t do anything really stupid during your first year on the job.”
It was excellent advice, because what he was telling me was how to avoid being the victim of confirmation bias. Show up to work late as a new firefighter and people think you’re a slacker, even if you had a good reason why you couldn’t make it on time.
Get into an argument with a more senior firefighter and you’re labeled difficult to work with. Every time you express a different opinion from that point on, you’re being argumentative, whereas someone who has not been the victim of this bias might be seen as a critical thinker.
Do something stupid in the early months on the job, and it follows you for the rest of your career. She dropped a ladder once — she’s not strong. He scraped the side of the engine — don’t trust him as a driver.
Confirmation bias means that you are unconsciously looking for information to uphold your judgment. So you notice when he bumps a tire against a curb, but not when he perfectly backs the truck into the station.
Expectations met
One of the worst outcomes of confirmation bias is that it can lead to self-fulfilling prophecies. If you treat someone as if he is unreliable, or a bad driver, or argumentative, and you only notice those behaviors that reinforce your conclusion, then that person tends to meet those expectations, even if they are negative.
Good officers understand that confirmation bias is a real problem, and will consciously challenge their assumptions about situations and the people they work with. In this way, they can see things as they really are, understanding the real situations they face and giving all their coworkers a fair chance to succeed, despite past history.
