representative bias — 1 thorough investigation

the representativeness bias is the one that makes you assume the man in the suit is good at math. i have been assumed to be good at math twice this year. neither time was the suit involved. neither time was the math.

writing this from my desk on a wednesday at 9:08am. carla is upstairs in some all-hands on the third floor that involves a slide deck nobody asked for. i have, give or take, the rest of the morning before she comes back with the look she does when slides have happened.

the reason i’m here, instead of pretending to update the wip 2022 list (which is, yes, still called that), is that representative bias has been doing my thinking for me again, and i’d like to file a complaint, even if the complaint is mostly against myself.

writing this from my desk. carla is in the all-hands. i can hear someone on the floor below sharpening a pencil, which is a sound i didn’t know offices still made.

i should say up front: this isn’t the bigger cousin. the bigger cousin is confirmation bias, where you go looking for proof you were right all along. representative bias is what happens BEFORE that. it’s the snap judgment. confirmation bias is the cleanup crew that arrives later to make the snap judgment look planned. they work as a team. nobody pays them. they bill me directly.

1. representative bias, brief

here is what representative bias is, in a sentence a normal person could say at a bar without anyone moving away: you see a thing, the thing reminds you of another thing, you decide the new thing is the same as the old thing. done. case closed. brain done thinking. brain has, in fact, never started thinking. brain just matched a shape.

the problem is that shapes lie. the chart you saw at the airport once, the one with the silhouettes of professions, that chart is what your brain is using as a database. it is not a good database. it has, in my reckoning, about nine entries. one of them is “scientist” and it is wearing a lab coat. it has been wearing the lab coat since 1962. it has not aged.

so when i’m in a meeting and someone says “carla, what does the data show”, i picture the data showing something. i picture it as a line going up. i don’t picture it as the actual numbers, because the actual numbers are in a spreadsheet and the spreadsheet has tabs and the tabs have macros and the macros are broken. i picture a line. the line is, in my head, the truth. the line is representative bias wearing a hat.

the term itself comes, i’m fairly sure, from two researchers who were not in the same office at the same time, who wrote it down sometime in the seventies, and who would be embarrassed at how much of their work has ended up on the back of cereal boxes. i looked it up once. i won’t look it up again. the manual they reference on the shows i watch is enough.

2. the wip 2022 list as exhibit a

i have a list at work called the wip 2022 list. wip means work in progress. 2022 means it was started in 2022. it is now considerably later than 2022 and the list is still called the wip 2022 list, because changing the name would be admitting something, and we don’t admit things on the third floor. the list has 47 items. 47 is a number you should remember. it has its own tab. nobody opens the tab.

here is where representative bias gets me. i look at the list. it LOOKS like a to-do list. to-do lists, in my brain’s airport chart, mean things that will be done. so when carla asks “where are we on the wip 2022 list”, my brain produces the sentence “moving along nicely” without consulting the list. the list is not moving along nicely. the list is not moving at all. the list has the structural integrity of a museum exhibit.

but it LOOKS like a to-do list. so it must, by representative bias, BE a to-do list. so the words “moving along nicely” are, by my brain’s logic, true. they are not true. they are representative.

this is, by the way, the same brain that put a fork in the seventh microwave i have killed. a fork looks like a thing that goes in a microwave because forks look like spoons and spoons go in microwaves and the brain matched the shape. the fork did not. the brain did. that’s representative bias in a kitchen.

3. carla’s pass-by as exhibit b

carla just walked past my desk. she didn’t say anything. she did the thing where she carries a folder at chest height and looks straight ahead, which in office body language means either “everything is fine” or “the building is on fire and i have decided not to share”. the two are visually identical. that is representative bias’s gift to the workplace.

my brain, looking at carla holding the folder, produced the conclusion “everything is fine” because that is the more common outcome of carla walking past my desk. the more common outcome is, in fact, that everything is mostly fine and i return to the wip 2022 list and pretend. so the conclusion was reasonable. it was also a guess. a guess that LOOKED like a conclusion. that is the whole tic in one mug shot.

i could have asked her. i could have said “carla is everything fine”. i did not, because asking would imply that i was paying attention, and paying attention is, on the third floor, a confession. so i made the guess and i typed the next sentence and i let the bias do the work and i am, as a reward, still employed. for now.

this is the part where i am supposed to admit i could be a liar by omission. but a liar, in the strict sense, has to say a thing. but lying requires saying a thing. i did not say a thing. i thought a thing and let it stand. that is technically not lying. that is representative bias doing its quiet, professional work, the kind of work the wip 2022 list aspires to one day do. except representative bias actually finishes its tasks.

4. the seventh microwave as exhibit c

the seventh microwave looked like the previous six microwaves. that is the whole reason i bought it. i walked into the store, i saw a microwave, my brain ran the chart in the airport, the chart said “microwave”, the box said “microwave”, i bought a microwave. i did not check the wattage. i did not check the turntable diameter. i did not check whether the door opened from the side i needed it to open from. i checked nothing. it was, my brain assured me, representative.

it turned out to be a microwave that takes nine minutes to do what the previous one did in three. that is, representative-bias-speaking, still a microwave. it heats. it dings. it has a small light inside that i’m fairly sure i imagined. but it is not, by any working definition, an upgrade. it is a downgrade i identified as a microwave because of the shape.

the third yoga mat under the couch is a separate but related case. i bought it because it looked like the previous two yoga mats and i assumed i would use it like i used the previous two, which is to say, i assumed i would buy it, look at it once, and let it migrate under the couch. that prediction was, as i note here, correct. so representative bias is not always wrong. it is, however, always lazy. and laziness, when it gets lucky, is mistaken for skill. i would like to get on record as saying that’s an error.

if you’ve seen moneyball, you know what the opposite of representative bias looks like in a sport. the entire plot is a man with a spreadsheet refusing to use the airport chart. the men with the airport chart are, in the movie, very angry about it. that is, i think, the funniest part. the airport chart is so confident. it has been wearing the lab coat since 1962.

5. why representative is a polite word

“representative” is a polite word for “what i already thought”. if a sample is “representative” of a population, it means the sample looks like the population, which means it confirms the picture you already had. that is the trick. the word sounds neutral. the word sounds statistical. the word is, in fact, a small mirror. you see your own assumptions in it and you call them data.

i know this because i have, on the wip 2022 list, an item that says “make the dashboard more representative”. it has been on the list since 2022. it means, when i’m honest, “make the dashboard show what i want to show”. which is not the same as making it more accurate. it is, in fact, in some ways, the opposite. but it sounds like accuracy. it has the shape of accuracy. the airport chart approves.

this is also why the taxman sends letters in serif font — because serif font has the shape of authority, and the taxman cannot afford to look like he might be wrong. the font is doing the work of representativeness. you open the envelope and your brain has already lost the argument, and the letter inside hasn’t even said anything yet.

mike at the corner bar has not filed since 2019, which means he has, by now, received many such envelopes. he keeps them in a drawer he calls “the drawer”. mike has a system for taxes. the system is the drawer. the system is, by representative bias, a system, because it has the shape of one — there is a location, there is a category of object, there is a verb (drawer-ing). but the drawer does no work. the drawer is mike’s wip 2022 list. mike and i are, in this respect, the same man with different jobs.

11:02am. carla is back from the all-hands. she is at her own desk. she is not looking over. that is, by representative bias, fine.

6. verdict, the bias represents me poorly

so. here is the finding, after the wip 2022 list, after carla’s folder, after the seventh microwave, after the third yoga mat, after the drawer where mike keeps his taxes, after the airport chart that has not aged.

i have representative bias. i have it badly. i have it in a way that has shaped my career, my appliance choices, my reading of meetings i’m not in, and the entire content of a list nobody opens. i don’t think i can get rid of it. the firmware is from the savanna. the savanna had tigers. my office has carla. the brain treats them similarly. that’s the bug. that’s also, somehow, the feature. if you really want to go down the rabbit hole on this, look at a beautiful mind — a film about a man whose brain made shapes out of nothing and called them patterns. that is representative bias at the high end. mine is at the low end. mine just buys microwaves.

the only thing i can do is name it, every so often, when i catch it. say to myself: that was a guess in a suit. that was the chart at the airport. that was not the spreadsheet. say it, then go back to the wip 2022 list and not open it, because opening it would be admitting something, and we don’t admit things on the third floor.

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