David Dylan Thomas

Episode 70
Brave UX

Rising Above Our Biases in Design

In this episode of Brave UX, David Dylan Thomas shares practical ways of making design more inclusive, reassures us that other people can’t read our minds, and suggests a fresh approach to tackling systemic harms.

Highlights include:

What is the Illusion of Transparency?
How do we rise above our biases in design?
What is an assumption audit and how does it work?
How do we change bad behaviour without cancelling people?
What separates bias from the isms - racism, sexism, ageism etc.?

April 26, 202201:25:25

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Who is David Dylan Thomas?

David is the Founder and CEO of the appropriately named David Dylan Thomas LLC, the company he established to further his mission to educate people about inclusive design and the role bias plays in our decision making.

The author of “Design for Cognitive Bias”, a book that helps people to understand the logic powering our bias and how to start designing more consciously , AND the host of The Cognitive Bias Podcast, a show with over 100 episodes, David knows a thing or two about bias.

An experienced speaker, David has delivered powerful talks about bias, design and civil discourse across the world, at events such as TEDNYC, SXSW Interactive, UX Copenhagen, An Event Apart and the IA Conference.

Transcript

Brendan Jarvis:
Hello and welcome to another episode of Brave UX. I'm Brendan Jarvis, Managing Founder of The Space InBetween, the home of New Zealand's only specialist evaluative UX research practice and world-class UX lab, enabling brave teams across the globe to de-risk product design and equally brave leaders to shape and scale design culture. Here on Brave UX though, it's my job to help you to put the pieces of the product puzzle together, I do that by unpacking the stories, learnings, and expert advice of world class UX, design and product management professionals. My guest today is David Dylan Thomas. Dave is the Founder and CEO of the appropriately named David Dylan Thomas LLC, the company he established to further his work, educating people about inclusive design and the role that bias plays in our decision making.
The author of Design for Cognitive Bias, a book that helps people to understand the logic, powering our bias, and how to start designing more consciously, and the host of the Cognitive Bias Podcast, a show with over 100 episodes, Dave knows a thing or two about bias. A 20-year practitioner of content strategy and UX, Dave has consulted major clients in entertainment, healthcare, publishing, finance, and retail. And prior to starting his consulting company, Dave was a Principal of Content Strategy and a Content Strategy Advocate at Think Company, a Philadelphia based experience design and software development firm.
Dave is a generous contributor to the tech and UX communities, having previously been the Co-organizer of Barcamp Philly, President of Content Strategy Philly and Creator of Content Camp, an un-conference about the future of content. An experienced speaker, Dave has delivered powerful talks about bias, design, and civil discourse across the world at events such as TED NYC, South by Southwest Interactive, UX Copenhagen, An Event Apart, and the IA Conference. Rumor has it, he has also recently launched a new podcast. I've been looking forward to meeting Dave today and also to learning a few new things from him. Dave, welcome to the show.
David Dylan Thomas:
Thanks for having me. Looking forward to it.
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah, yeah, and me too, actually. And Dave, I did mention your new podcast in the intro and I was curious about that. What is this new podcast all about?
David Dylan Thomas:
Sure. So it's called, lately I've been thinking about, and it's based on this experiment get together. I do every now and then where people show up and instead of their name tag saying, hello, my name is, it just says Lately I've been thinking about. And then they fill in the blank with whatever they've been thinking about and they just start chatting with each other. And I kind of love the conversations that develop from that. So I just have a guest on and they introduce themselves and then I ask the million dollar question, tell me what you've been thinking about lately and whatever it is they've been thinking about. That's what we're going to chat about for the next hour. And it's like, I could have President Obama on, and if he wants to talk about knitting, we're talking about knitting. I like the idea that you don't have to hawk anything if you're on there.
It's just sort of whatever. I'm picking people who I know, I often have really deep interesting conversations with cuz they're curious people. They're nice people, they're smart people, and whatever they have been thinking about, you can bet that it's going to be something interesting that you can sink your teeth into. And I didn't really have an outlet for that before when I was doing cognitive bias podcast. It sort of had to come back to cognitive bias, but there were some conversations I wanted to have with folks who weren't into that. So it's like I just wanna talk to people about what I want to talk to them about. And that's literally where the podcast came from. So I did a pilot episode, it's out now, and I'm recording a whole bunch for my first season. I'm probably going to launch in the next few weeks or so, depending on when this SLO is.
Brendan Jarvis:
Right. And so it sounds like you are just going to freestyle it. There doesn't seem to be any sort of discussion guide or prep that goes into it. You're literally just going to ask people what what's on their mind
David Dylan Thomas:
And I don't even wanna know. Yeah, I tell them before and hey, this is what we're going to do and I'm going to ask you the question. And what I want is if people literally that day have some new thought, make it about that. They can prepare if they want, but I literally wanna know what, what's been chewing on lately that they just can't get their head around or they're just can't stop thinking or talking about. That's what I want. So I don't even wanna know beforehand. I kind of like the surprise of it.
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah. Wonderful. Well, I can't wait to see how it all shapes up. And I think we were just talking before we hit record, that Amy, a mutual friend of ours is going to be a guest on the podcast.
David Dylan Thomas:
Yes. Very, very looking forward to that Amy sound too. She's fantastic. Yeah.
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah. Wonderful. Yeah, definitely. If you're listening people and you haven't seen Amy's episode on Brave UX, check her out and then go and check her out on Dave's new show When the episode's published. Dave, I understand that you are someone with many talents and those talents that go much further than just design and content strategy. In fact, I understand in a past life that you were the lead singer of a rock band.
David Dylan Thomas:
I've been the lead singer of a few bands. I like to think that the reason I'm not shy on stage, I give a lot of talks now, is because I started being on stage when I was in high school and rock. I was in two different rock bands in high school and then became kind of a singer songwriter all through college and a little laughter. So I've been on stage a lot and I honestly feel like going on stage and giving talks now is me scratching that rock star itch cuz I don't go on stage before music anymore. And it's like this is the closest I can get to that. But yeah, I definitely get a natural high off of that experience in connecting with the audience. But yeah, I was singer songwriter for years and years and years and it's one of those I sort of hope to get back to someday. But yeah, that was a big part of my life for a long time.
Brendan Jarvis:
You've definitely got the right name for it.
David Dylan Thomas:
Well that's not even a real name. My legal name is David Thomas. I was born without a middle name, no middle name on birth, my birth certificate. And at the age of Google when I started coming up and I googled my name, it's like there's a billion David Thomas's many far more famous to me. I'm like, okay, what can I throw in there to make myself a little more searchable? And also I like Dylan Thomas. I like having DDTs my initials, I made it more fun. But yeah, that's all made up
Brendan Jarvis:
Actually. Well, didn't say I had a suspicion, but it definitely has that lovely alliteration and it's definitely a great stage name. Now I just wanna tie this back to cognitive bias cuz I understand that performers sometimes possibly all performers and would-be performers as well sometimes for victim to a cognitive bias here when it comes to standing up in front of a crowd, what is the illusion of transparency?
David Dylan Thomas:
So illusion of transparency is a fascinating bias and the way it works is if you're on stage or if you're just presenting your work to stakeholders, you have this sense that everyone can see how nervous you are when in fact it's not even a little bit true. And an experiment they did is they had five people go on stage in front of an audience and they told two of them to lie. And afterwards they asked them, Hey, did you think that people knew that you were lying? And they're like, oh, of course it was obvious how I was lying. People can see right through me. But if you ask the audience who was lying, they're no better at chance than figuring out who is lying. They have no idea. And the neat thing about this particular bias is out of the hundreds of biases I've studied, it is the only one where knowing about it actually makes a difference.
Most biases, if I tell you about it and you are aware that you're doing it, you'll still do it cuz it's a bias, it's a shortcut, it's automatic, you don't think about it for whatever reason. This one bias, again, another experiment, they had a few people go on stage and some of them knew about the bias and some of them didn't. The ones who knew about the bias performed better. And so this is the one bias where knowing about it helps. So anyone listening right now, you have now been inoculated against the solution of transparency. But yeah, it is fascinating, but it is really helpful. Whenever I'm teaching people about public speaking, I make sure they know about that. Even if you feel like everyone can see how you feel, it's a lot harder to tell than you think.
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah. And when you were on stage in your twenties performing as a solo artist, was this something that you were aware of or was it something that you just naturally had to push through and sort of come to master
David Dylan Thomas:
For whatever reason? I'm weird. I'm a bit of an attention hog, so I feel more comfortable on stage. I tell people a lot. I'm perfectly happy to walk up in front of a hundred strangers and give them a talk on whatever, or even improvise if I need to put those same a hundred people at a cocktail hour and I'm supposed to introduce myself to them individually and make small talk, no, I will run home and watch Netflix long before I'll do that. I think where it comes from, if I can armchair psychoanalyze myself when I was a kid, I would get bullied a lot. And in sixth grade I distinct to remember we had a vocabulary assignment where you have to take all the vocabulary words and put them in a story. And most people wrote stories about, I don't know, going to the store or whatever. I wrote a story about a planet with dinosaurs and all this other stuff. When I told the story, everyone was wrapped and I know noticed, hey, no one's bullying me right now. And I think my survival mechanism or whatever kind of kicked in and kind of noted that. And I'm like, okay, this is a safe space for me. So for me, public speaking feels like a safe space in a way that for a lot of other people it feels like the opposite.
Brendan Jarvis:
That's interesting because when you are public speaking, and I've listened to a bunch of your talks and preparation for today, you are very good at bringing people into the story, the context, the thing that you're trying to help them understand. But it's almost like what you're describing there is that by doing that they feel that, but you are actually on stage keeping them at arm's length from you, which is a completely different dynamic than being on the floor with people in a cocktail hour as you sort of described earlier. Yeah,
David Dylan Thomas:
Well I think there's, it's interesting to say that cuz I think of it a very special type of connection. Stephen Colbert talks a lot about how humor is this connecting piece because as soon as somebody laughs at something you've said they're become vulnerable and they're making themselves vulnerable to you in a way that they are vibing with whatever you've just said to them. And we're both in this shared moment of humor where we both found that thing funny and we're both able to laugh at it. And for him it is about creating the cushion. But I do think the arms length beat this piece is more about context. When I'm giving a talk, I'm controlling the context around that interaction with those a hundred people. And if I'm at a cocktail party, I feel so vulnerable, I feel like I don't have a prepared speech. You know what I mean? I don't can't control the context of that conversation, that stranger and even though nothing bad's going to happen, the anxiety around that uncertainty of I don't control the way that we're where this conversation's going to go. You know what I mean? That
Brendan Jarvis:
I do actually,
David Dylan Thomas:
Right. Feels much in a weird way, scarier than just I know what the beginning of my talk is, even the q and a part, which is my favorite part of an eight talk that I give. And I don't know what they're going to ask, but it's still framed in this way where it's like, okay, it's probably going to be about this or that. It's not going to be come outta nowhere. And again, I don't even know what it is I'm afraid of in that cocktail party conversation, but it's not going to be that right or it's not going to be like I walk up to a stranger with zero context and they're going to reject me. I think that's the other piece. I don't have a fear of the crowd rejecting me in a way that I think an individual at a cocktail party, some random person I never met, I'm going to what? Walk up to them and say hi, that's absurd. You know what I mean? What if they, I don't know, throw a drink? I don't know. Again, I don't know what I'm afraid of, but it's like somehow that seems scarier.
Brendan Jarvis:
Are you a control freak, Dave?
David Dylan Thomas:
That is a good question. And some things, absolutely. And other things, I'm very mellow. I think in general, and this is something I've learned over time, through therapy, through meditation, I am much better at sitting with stuff. And so the discomfort of being in that cocktail party situation, I would probably be better with now than I used to be, but it still would be hard pressed to choose that [laugh] as like, what do you wanna do tonight? We can watch Netflix, we can go to a museum, or we can go to a cocktail hour and you can try to talk to a bunch of randos. I would choose either Netflix or a museum.
Brendan Jarvis:
Fair enough. Well, speaking about watching something, I understand a few years back before you kicked off this whole dive into cognitive bias, you watched a really interesting South by Southwest talk by Aris Barnett who's a behavioral economist at Harvard University. And I wanted to ask you about this just to frame things up for people. What was her talk about and what was the impact that that talk had on your life?
David Dylan Thomas:
Sure. So she gave a talk called Gender Equality by Design, and I highly recommend anybody listening to this find it on YouTube, it's free, it's a fantastic talk. But really she's getting into this idea that design can enable us to get beyond certain biases. So the example she gives is some hotel rooms, the light will just go out when you leave or just rooms in general. Now you might have office buildings to do that and that's basically the building's way of saying, we know it's an extra step for you to remember to turn the light off and we know you probably want a greener safer world, so we'll just take care of that for you. We're just going to default to that rather than defaulting to a more carbon footprinting world. And so that's the premise. And one of the things she points out is that a lot of implicit gender or racial bias is really just a form of pattern recognition.
So if you imagine that you have to hire a web developer, the image that might pop into your head when I say the words web developer might be skinny white guy. And it's not because you actually believe that men are better programmers than women far from it, but the pattern that you've seen in your life from movies or television or even offices you've worked in starts to create that equation. And so if you see a name at the top of a resume that doesn't quite fit the pattern, you're starting to give that resume the side eye and the idea that something as terrible as racial or gender bias could sometimes come back to something as simple or even human as pattern recognition. That really stuck in my head and I think it was building on a fascination I already had with the brain. So my mother was a psych major at us at U C L my wife is a pediatric neuropsychologist, so I've always been kind of adjacent to people who know a lot about the brain and found it really fascinating.
But this was kind of bringing it into my current role, which was as a content strategist and it's like, oh, these things go together. And I just basically made it my mission to learn as much as I could about cognitive bias. And I went to the rational wiki page of cognitive biases and it's like, well if we're a hundred there, and it's like, okay, this is a lot. So I took one a day, studied it next day, looked at the next one and became the guy who wouldn't shut up about cognitive bias. So my friends eventually said, please get a podcast. But it's funny, if you look at my podcast episodes and you go to that rational wiki page, almost one for one, it's just going down the list and even the seasons of the podcast are broken up by the sections of that page. So there's a whole section about probability and how bad we are with thinking about probability. That's a whole season. There's a whole section on social biases that's whole season. It's like I'm not even trying to hide it, just open up the page bias. Okay, there we go. But yeah, that's how it all started.
Brendan Jarvis:
Well it's actually a really smart decision to make. I mean, not only are you pursuing an interest that or something that interests you, but you've also made that decision that removes a hundred other decisions as to what am I going to record today? You just literally go back to the list and what's next? It's what I'm doing.
David Dylan Thomas:
Yeah, yeah. I'm fighting the decision fatigue bias, it's sort of deciding what you're going to wear the night before. It's like that's one less decision I gotta make in the morning. It's like, hey, I don't have to pick, which I did that, I mean I did this, even the t-shirt I'm wearing now it's put my t-shirts in the thing and whatever's on top, that's the one I'm going to wear [laugh]. Like it's random enough that I'm not going to spend a lot of time thinking about it.
Brendan Jarvis:
So you have spent a lot of time thinking about cognitive bias and as you mentioned, you've recorded over a hundred episodes, about a hundred different biases that we do hold out of that a hundred or so that you've studied. What is the weirdest cognitive bias that you've come across?
David Dylan Thomas:
It's not so much a particular bias so much as it is a category of biases. It has to do with this thing called priming. Actually did a great episode with Dr. Erica Franz about this. But priming is this, basically it's that thing where you could put something in a room that changes your behavior but you don't know it does that. So a weird example is if you walk into a room and you can smell cleaning products, you're more likely to pick up after yourself. And it's just little things like that. Or if you are having a meeting and there's a briefcase visible, people will act more competitively than if it's like a backpack. It's like these little tweaks. And my favorite version of this, and to be fair, this one, I'm not sure this has been replicated, so take it with a grain of salt, but there's a bias called reactance and it's basically that you can't tell me what to do bias.
So if you have one wall that has, please do not write on this wall. Assign says, please not write on this wall. And then another wall that has under no circumstances should you write on this wall, which one's going to get more graffiti? Especially in the states, we love to rage against anyone telling us what to do. Just look at our covid response. But there's a really interesting experiment around reactants where you have the subject walk down a hallway and at the end of the hallway is a table with a big pile of different brands of candy. And you say, take three pieces of candy, any three you want under normal circumstances, the subject walks down the hallway and picks up three of their favorite kind of candy unless you give them a weirdly narrow hallway. The subjects who go down the weirdly narrow hallway almost always pick three different brands of candy, whether they're their favorite or not.
And the thinking is the weirdly narrow hallway is priming them, making them feel like their options are being taken away. So when they get to the end of the hallway, they will express those options the only way they can by dammit taking three different pieces of candy. You can't tell me what to do, which I find absolutely fascinating because it's your brain. I mean this is kind of what I find fascinating about bias in general, is it you are behaving in ways we like to think that we live our lives. We go into a situation, we make a decision about what's do in that situation and we do it. And everything I've learned tells me that happens maybe 5% of the time [laugh], the vast majority of the time, our brain's doing shit. We have no idea. Our brain is really good at making us think. It was all planned and it was all rational. But an outside observer, watching that and manipulating it makes it very clear very quickly, oh no, you're so much of this is just on autopilot. You have no idea and your brain is brilliant at fooling you into thinking you are in control. It's almost condescending. It's like, no, you're doing good, you're doing good, pal. Keep it up totally in control here.
Brendan Jarvis:
I do wanna come to how our biases can be exploited by people that actually understand how they work and can be used to steer us to do things that we otherwise possibly wouldn't do if we were behaving from our rational mind. But you said something there that is also quite interesting and it's something that I learned from you, which I imagine you learned from somebody else, which was that 95% of the time were actually operating on autopilot. And that led me to wonder if that is the case, is there ever a hope for us to rise above our bias and be able to operate in the world in a way that is still effective? Which I believe a lot of the automation is just to allow us to cope with the complexity that goes on around us, but that enables us to actually be better people and to overcome some of those things that we just automatically respond to that are not necessarily the best for the other people around us and the world that we existed.
David Dylan Thomas:
So there's kind of two answers to that, both of which are a version of no.
So the whole idea of rising above bias is kind of trying to rise above breathing. We gotta do it, but you can control it. I can control going to breathe no matter what. And if I don't, I'm in big trouble. But I can control my breathing, I can breathe more deeply, which actually sends autonomic signals and actually tells my body to calm down. I can breathe more quickly, which gets me like I can control my breathing but I can't not breathe. The mental shortcuts your mind takes are how you even get through the day. You're making something like a trillion decisions every day. I'm making decisions right now about what's to do with my hands and where to look and how fast to talk and thinking carefully about every single one of those decisions. Nothing would ever get done. So the shortcuts that our minds take, the fact that it is 95% on autopilot's actually a very, very good thing.
It's a survival mechanism. Our brains being able to predict, to predict that pattern in the grass might be a tiger. Let me go the other way. And those of us who didn't do that math ended up getting eaten and not passing on our genes. So we're kind of hardwired to do a lot of this stuff as quickly as possible. And I was talking to a friend today about this, it's sort of the predictive text on your phone. Our minds do that. Our minds try to predict, even when you're talking, my mind is trying to anticipate the next word and it's kind of hard to actually stop and listen. And then the biases are really just when the predict predictive text gets it wrong, which happens a lot, right? And if it does it in a way that's harmful, like me basing on your looks that oh, you're probably a criminal, right? Some bad predictive
Brendan Jarvis:
Texts. Do I give that vibe,
David Dylan Thomas:
Right? [laugh], right?
Brendan Jarvis:
I was trying to cover these tattoos. Sorry you noticed them.
David Dylan Thomas:
Tattoos are actually a really fascinating example cuz I think the vibe around them is changing radically. But that would be a great example. It's like, oh, that guy has tattoos. Ooh, I probably shouldn't trust him. Right? Again, that's not really you sitting down and saying, should I trust that guy with tattoos? That's your brain just doing this quick text thing. But
Brendan Jarvis:
There's a social story there. There would be a reason behind why there is a distrust of people with tattoos, although that is changing as you've said. But that would've come from somewhere for some reason. And
David Dylan Thomas:
Usually a lot of pattern setting, pattern recognition, the lot of association. So the bad guys in movies always have tattoos or whatever it is, or the criminals they show on TV always have to, it's an association that gets built up and again, never consciously acknowledged, but it's there now and it's just waiting to see a tattoo and be like, oh, danger. So anyway, all of that to say you can't get rid of it. What you can do is a couple different things. One is you can the macro level starts to make sure that the decisions you're making aren't just based on your own gut reactions. It's having other people come in who have different biases. Maybe the person who runs the tattoo power lawyer is also making decisions about how much we should trust people with the tattoos. [laugh], you bring in people who are not like you.
And if we're talking about design or really any human interaction, you are ideally bring in people who have less power than you, and especially people who have less power than you who are going to be impacted by your work, by whatever it is, your work on, your design, whatever it is, your policy, whatever you're doing, if it's going to impact other people, and especially if some of those people have less power than you, those are the people you want their input, you want their biases at the table along with your biases. Cuz that decreases the likelihood of harm, which really is the endgame here. We're not, the point of trying to get above bias is that you are somehow going to make better, less harmful, more helpful decisions. And to do that, if removing bias completely isn't on the table, then bringing complimentary biases sort of decreases the odds of causing harm.
And to me, that ends up being a better endgame. The kind of, I'm going to bring others in piece of it. The other piece of it though at the personal level is changing those patterns because that pattern of, oh, women are not as good at design. That pattern that lie is something that got built up over time and you're not going to get rid of it overnight. But what you can do is start establishing different patterns. So I am a filmmaker, I love the movies, but if I think movie director, the image that pops in my head is Steven Spielberg, right? White Guy Glasses, beard cap.
And it's not that I think that men are better directors than women, I really don't believe that, but the pattern in my head says that. And so I have deliberately gone out. I literally have a Trello that's like, okay today I'm going to watch an action movie directed by a woman. I'm going to watch a horror film directed by someone who's L G B T Q. I'm going to introduce all these other perspectives at volume to start to change the pattern and not for nothing by doing that, actually seeing movies that are coming from a different point of view and is a much broader storytelling pattern P pallet. So I'm actually getting a much better cinema going experience by deliberately seeking out. And that's what it comes down deliberately seeking out the opposite of what you're used to as a means of changing your patterns. Because if you go with what you're used to, the world is not designed to serve up unique and new things to you. The wed is certainly not designed to serve up unique things to you. You have to go search for that on your own. And it can be found, but it's something you gotta make the effort.
Brendan Jarvis:
And through that effort, you become a more interesting and a richer human in terms of the experience that you can have. But is there a risk here when it comes to bias and trying to rise above it? And I like the analogy you gave around breathing. You've gotta do it, but you can control how you do it. But is there a risk here that people become too self-reflexive and start to spin wheels and get a bit stuck in the mud with how do they actually exist in the world knowing that they're aware that they have these biases but being somewhat beholden to them. Is there some risk inherent at all that people just get stuck and just don't know how to make progress?
David Dylan Thomas:
Yeah, I mean think there is, and I've seen it. I, I'll tell you what I have seen, I have seen people afraid to take any action because they're afraid now that anything they do is going to cause harm. And what I say to that is, you're right, any action you take is going to cause harm, but not doing anything is actually going to be worse unless you're really far off base. And what I try to do is to explain to people, look, there is the myth of the social justice warrior who is beloved by all because they are fighting for the underdog and all the underdogs love them. And I think somewhere a little bit of savior complex might be in there, but at the end of the day, that's a myth. That's a complete and total myth.
Brendan Jarvis:
The Che Guara that used to wear the t-shirt of when you're a teenager,
David Dylan Thomas:
Yeah, not for nothing. Chay was certainly not loved by everyone. I mean even Mult Luther King, when he died, 75% of the nation was against him when he died [laugh]. Okay? But the idea that you're somehow going to be the champion of the underdog and all the underdogs are going to love you, that is belies the fact that the underdogs themselves do not agree on what you should do to help. So there's no version of this where you're beloved by all if you try to do this stuff. So what you have to do is take steps that are educated steps, certainly. And again, that's one of the refrains you'll hear a lot from people. One of the chronic problems we see is that, oh, you're black. Tell me all your troubles so I can be a better white person. It's like, that's not no, just, okay, well wait, how much money do you have? Right? Because cause you're sort of as someone to volunteer their trauma and it's like, no, let's, let's not do that. One of the refrains we'll hear that is we kind wrote a lot of this down already. There's so much you waits ways you can educate yourselves. When I was a kid, it's like, if you'd like to learn more, check your local library. I'm like, Hey, check your local library.
Brendan Jarvis:
Read some books.
David Dylan Thomas:
Right? Okay. There's a lot out there already because I honestly, I think that's one of the great advantages we have is that this isn't trying to cure cancer. We actually know what's happened so far and there are recommendations for how to go forward. So for example, if we talk about policing
Brendan Jarvis:
Just on that, just on though, that's an interesting observation, but it also assumes that people read and
My lived experience is that not enough people read and not even I read enough, not as much as I'd like to. And the economy that we've shaped for today is more about the economy of now we want everything now and hence the medium that we are talking on here. Having these conversations about these types of things in this medium, the medium of now, how people are currently learning about things. I feel that there's a role there to try and raise awareness of these types of things and people may or may not choose to read more deeply about it and they definitely should if they can and they have the time. But there's a lot of value that's locked up in books at the moment and it's almost like how do we get some of that value out and into a medium that's easily consumed by people that just can't or don't read?
David Dylan Thomas:
I mean yes and no, right? But one of the things that shocks people is that millennials use the libraries far more than any other age
Brendan Jarvis:
Group. I did not know that.
David Dylan Thomas:
People read when they want to and to that point of reading versus not reading, well the 1619 project is available as a book and as a podcast or you can read the new Jim Crow or you can watch the 13th documentary by Ava DuVernay. They're both kind of achieving the same events at this point. There's no excuse if you wanna play video games and maybe they won't kill you, which is a fantastic online game about racism no matter what. And again, that's kind of the beauty of it. No matter what medium is your preferred way of engaging with ideas, we we've got that covered. If it's music, I cannot tell you just go listen to Dam or any Kendrick Lamar album. There is so much there. So I feel like, yeah, you might not wanna read. And so I think people read more than we give them credit for.
But even if you don't wanna read, we've got so many different ways to learn about these things and not just learn about the background and the context, but learn about the actions. So policing for example, it's not just, okay, here's the history of policing and how it's hurt African Americans over time. Okay, good luck. It's like, no, we have action items. We need to end qualified immunity, right? Again, it's not trying to cure an incurable disease. No. We know what actions would make it a lot better or guaranteed income, experiment after experiment, guaranteed income is kind of showing these positive results, salary, transparency, showing all these positive results. Again, it's not that we don't know what to do a lot of the time, honestly, more about political will and about saying, okay, now that you know what to do, are you willing to wait? Willing to take the step because the steps required are unpalatable.
I'll even give you an extremely current example, which is right now we have war in the Ukraine Russian invasion and policymakers are saying, look, if you really wanna wound Russia right now, stop buying their oil. And people, some people are like, of course. And other people are like, wait, you mean oil prices are going to go up? And it's like, okay, you're willing to put a little Ukrainian flag on your social media, but oh no, if gas prices go up, oh that's, I'm sorry, you're on your own Ukraine, right? But it is honestly stuff like that where it's like we actually know what to do, but a lot of people are super not comfortable with the action that's actually required.
Brendan Jarvis:
You mentioned policing before and I know you've got a good example of how the way in which we frame our role in the world is quite powerful in terms of the choices that we make when we are reacting or proactively engaging with it around us. And I believe that there was a former police commissioner in Philadelphia called Charles H. Ramsey. And when he took power, you've got a story in terms of the office of the commissioner in Philadelphia. He asked his police officers a simple question that made them think quite deeply about what it was they were there to do and their relationship with their communities. What was that question and what did it lead to? So
David Dylan Thomas:
Yeah, I'll give you some of the backstory on this. I saw the very first TEDx Philly I think that ever happened. The first one I went to certainly, they had a bunch of speakers. One of them was Charles Ramsey who at the time had just become the police commissioner of Philadelphia. And I think that's two, three commissioners ago. But he tells the story about how he asks his officers on day one, what do you think your job is? And a lot of them would answer to enforce the law. And he would say, okay, that sounds like a reasonable answer, but what if I told you your job is to protect civil rights. Now that's a bigger job. It encompasses enforcing the law, but it's a bigger job because it forces you to treat people with dignity. And as soon as I heard that, that stuck with me.
This is long before I create the talk or the book, but the first time I gave the talk, which was at U UX Copenhagen like 20 17, 20 18, I put that in there and it stayed in there. Now this is before 2020 Black Lives Matter movement explodes with all of the murders that happened in that timeframe, but certainly not before. The habit [laugh] of police officers murdering black people had been a thing for a long time. And I remember making the conscious choice to leave that in there, even though it was really difficult. And we had this conversation in the book too, do we really, is this appropriate for the book? But I keep it in because now more than ever it's clear how we define our jobs as a matter of life and death. And it's a very emotional piece, but it kind of rings true. And there's something really powerful about that question.
What do you think your job is? Because it's another way of asking what is your purpose? Why are you here? It's one of the oldest human questions, why are we here? And I think how we answer whether we even choose to engage with the question, I think is one thing, [laugh], because I think a lot of us, it never even occurs to us. But then once we do engage with it, what answer we give has powerful implications for how we live our lives, how we do our jobs. And I think a really big clarion call for design right now is what is the role? What is the responsibility? There's that word responsibility, what is the role and responsibility of a designer? And I think for a long time, and certainly in the time I was enamored with design thinking and human-centered design, these cool new concepts, it was just, oh, design cool shit and impress people.
That's the role of design. It's like come up this cool new thing that no one ever thought of. And it's becoming clear now that no, that can't be it. That just can't be it cuz people are getting hurt if that's your goal, it's like, no, how do you find a way to define your job in a way that allows you to be more human to each other? That becomes the goal. And that is to me a much more interesting question than how does Bitcoin work or whatever, whatever the new hotness is. I'm much more interested in how are we defining our roles, whether it's as designers, as citizens, as people who live in a place as just people [laugh] that allows us to be more human to each other. I think that's a really interesting place to try to operate from.
Brendan Jarvis:
And I believe you've got a recommended practice that you advise design teams or anybody that I suppose that wants to get a broader view of their bias and how that might be impacting the solutions that they're shaping or the problems that they're trying to understand. And it's called an assumption audit. What is that all about? How does that work? Sure.
David Dylan Thomas:
So this is adapted from Project Inc. Blots designed for diversity framework, which is again Google. That is fantastic. They're fantastic. They're a group that does a lot of really great inclusive design work and with their permission totally pulled this and kind of mushed a little. But the basic idea is you get your team in a room before they start whatever they're working on, and you ask five questions. The first question is who are we? And you self-identify only as you feel comfortable, but you are thinking about things like age or neurodiversity or income. And some really interesting things come out of that because there are things people even forget to mention was like, oh we're all literate, which is, yeah
We about reading. It's a non insignificant thing to consider. So anyway, you do that piece, then you say question two, well how might those identities influence this thing we're working on? It kind of forces that out to the open. Then third question, who's not in the room? Anybody here ever been incarcerated? Anybody here ever had their immigration status question, right? Fourth question, how might that lack of perspective compromise this thing we're working on? And then finally fifth question, what can we do to include honor and give power to those perspectives throughout the design process? And those words are chosen very carefully include, yes, talk to people, honor, maybe pay them for their time. But give power goes back to the power thing. Are there people who are going to be impacted by this who have no say in how it turns out? And how can I actually give them a say cuz they have to live with this thing that we're making?
Brendan Jarvis:
What kind of person or what kind of things does the person facilitating a audit like this? Because this seems to me to be something that is getting quite deep into the things that could be quite confronting. The things that we don't necessarily wanna pay attention to. There's a reason why certain people aren't in the room, for example, whether it's a good reason or a bad reason to be judged. But what does that facilitator need to be mindful of when they're trying to coordinate this conversation and help people to answer some of these quite confronting questions?
David Dylan Thomas:
So there's a couple things. One is I do this as part of my I do an inclusive design workshop and this is always part of it. And what I've found is that it is better when I stay the hell out of it. [laugh], like when I facilitate by not facilitating, it's sort of like, and this is often in breakout rooms on zoom these days as opposed to in person. But even in person it's sort of like, okay, what an assumption it looks like here's what we're going to do. Everybody understand the rules? Okay great. I'm going to put 15 minutes on the clock go, I'll see you in a minute. I found that if I try to insert myself into that or guide that it gets more awkward. I found that people are actually pretty good at managing themselves. Now for context at this point in the workshop, we have already talked for hours about what it means to be in, we don't call it a safe space, but a brave space to kind of come back to the title of this podcast.
How do you make room to be brave? And I talk very much at the top I expectations sit around, Hey this workshop and all of the exercises that are in are here for you. You are not here for it. So if at any point you're like, you know what, I'd rather not, that is a perfectly acceptable answer. But I also say, look, part of learning inclusive design is about getting out of your comfort zone, especially if you're in a position of power. So try to be open to that. So there's a lot of expectations sitting around that. And to be honest, if you've signed up for an inclusive design workshop, the hope at least is that you're kind of open to these ideas, you're already kind of thinking about identity. And so I found very little pushback when I've done these kind of exercises. And again, the less I intervene I find the better those conversations go.
People sort of just knock wood cross fingers. But I've done this a lot of times and people have been self organizing pretty well around it. So weirdly, my advice is to say if you're facilitating one of these, make sure you level set and in a way that creates a brave space. But once you've done that, just let them make it clear to be accomplished. But then let them talk on their own and then you can come back later and they can discuss what their discussion was like. But people I've found are pretty willing to be open and honest about these things. I have seen people, if I have some people be uncomfortable, it's usually to be perfectly blunt white men who are, it makes me uncomfortable to be aware of how comfortable I am. You know what I mean? Which I'm like, great, that is great. Becoming uncomfortable is underrated and is necessary. And again, if it gets too uncomfortable, I'm cool with you nodding out. But I love that you are naming that discomfort and engaging with it that is really important and super necessary to the work work that's ahead.
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah. Because you never know where that discomfort might lead to in the future. I'm not suggesting that every uncomfortable white man is going to wake up one day and realize that there's a lot of work to be done, but you just don't know. And one of the things that I'd love to talk to you about soon, which is the sort of idea of civil discourse and what that actually means and how we actually move our conversations from binary, quite adversarial perspectives to perspectives that make room for a third space and room for progress and innovation and inquiry. But before we do that, I was curious about this assumption audit and it's clearly something that's useful, it's highly needed in the world in which we're designing for. But how do you avoid things like this becoming a box ticking exercise? Sure. Corporations and organizations are very good at the bureaucracy side of making forms and putting inside putting in place processes that just become a way of doing things that we don't necessarily become conscious of and think of. So how do you prevent something that's as important as this just becoming something that people tick a box for?
David Dylan Thomas:
I don't know. That's a danger because if it's done it becomes like an accessibility audit. Like QA actually I think is the thing I compare it to. So QA for a lot of people is in a sense of box you tick. So QA for any listeners who don't know is quality assurance about to release an app, a website, whatever. Someone has to go through all of the code and click all of the buttons and make sure they all work. Cuz the last thing they do is launch a website and then stuff doesn't work. It's very embarrassing, it's very costly. So companies invest and QA teams, there are some people who sold job is to go in and QA that website, make sure it works. And it is technically speaking of boxy tech, but it's the nature of that box is such that it can't not help.
And so what you hope for with getting back to that pattern recognition, what you hope for with an assumption on is it forces you to talk about something in a way that is going to influence you for the rest of that project. Cuz one of the pushback, and I think valid pushback I get sometimes with assumption audits is that well what if we discover all these gaps and there's no time in the project plans to doing anything about it, which happens Ideally you're doing this before you even budget the project [laugh], right? So you can say, oh we're missing this perspective, let's make sure to put time in the budget, ti time and budget against getting this perspective or bringing this person on the team, whatever. But that's probably not always going to be the case. And if you get to do the audit at all for a project that already has its timeline, already has its budget and you're just going to discover all these things that you're like, we can't fill that.
But you have now that little thing in your brain, you can't unaudited the audit [laugh], you now are hyper aware that there are no black women on your team and this is a product that's going to be used by a lot of black women and you're, you're not going to be able to let go of that. So you are going to be looking for opportunities for the rest of that project. Like hijacking that bias to now work for the people who have less power in the situation to say, okay, I'm always going to be thinking now about how is this going to affect black women or how is this, whatever that piece is, it is going to affect your design the same way that your default being white men would've impacted the design. So I would love for it to be a box that gets ticked if it were a box that gets ticked, right?
Actually ticked versus I think what we worry about is, oh, I'm going to hire a black designer and now once they're on the team, I'm going to act them, ask them to act like all the white designers [laugh]. Like that kind of box ticking isn't about bringing in a different perspective and giving that perspective power and letting that perspective change you. That is about saying, oh when I show my list on my website of all our employees, there's more brown faces which isn't actually accomplishing anything. So I think it's definitely a gray area there, but I really, I'm a big fan of getting things into the budget template as it were, so that when we open up a new project and we're going to budget it out, the audit is already there. The red team blue team, which is another inclusive exercise, is already there. Nobody questions it. So the odds of it happening go way up. So in a weird way, I don't wanna say I'm a fan of checking boxes, but I am a fan of getting the boxes in there [laugh], right?
Brendan Jarvis:
I get that. Yeah. Yeah. It's almost like it would seek to serve to change that bias over time as well through force of habit.
David Dylan Thomas:
And the thing is, by the third time you've done that, it kind of goes unless you've actually changed your team, which hopefully you have, but if you haven't it goes a lot quicker and you're like, okay, we need to start escalating this cuz this is the fifth assumption that we've done and it's clear there are no black women on this team and it is affecting the work we need to do something about this
Brendan Jarvis:
[affirmative]. Something else that I understand that you consider in terms of being a bias to be quite dangerous is the framing effect and the kind of questions that we ask of ourselves and of other people lead to a range of potential answers. But the design of the question, the design of what it is that we're trying to frame is sets the conditions and the rules for what comes next. But what is the framing effect and how can that be manipulated and used to stare people down a road that they otherwise wouldn't drive?
David Dylan Thomas:
Sure. So the framing effect is the bias. So an exa and the basic idea is that the way you frame something affects your behavior around it. So a simple example might be you go to a store and you see a sign that says beef, 95% lean and a sign that says beef, 5% fat. And which one do you think people are going to line up for? They're both the same thing or a box of condoms and it says these condoms are 99% effective. And there's another box that says these condoms have a 1% failure rate. And it's like, are you not one the ones that have a and but it's the same thing, right? I've just framed one in a way that makes it seem like a more better idea. And that's innocent enough when we're talking about that. But if we're talking about say, Hey, should we go to war in April or should we go to war in May, right?
You see what I did there? Now we've skipped over the question of should we be going to war in the first place, right? Or hey, should we put teachers guns in schools? Right? I've kind of skipped a few steps there, [laugh], right? There's some primary questions about gun control we don't have to talk about now, right? Because of we've already assumed that the guns are the solution to the problem. We actually talk about this a lot in design of not skipping ahead to the solution we've built in some sort of, but that part of the reason we do that is because of the framing effect. If we frame the solution, we're stuck with that solution. We haven't considered all these others. Now, when the way that plays out in question design, which is a really important tool in civil discourse, there's an experiment where you have a photo of a senior citizen behind the wheel of a car and you show that photo to one audience and you ask the audience, should this person drive this car?
Which again is basically a policy discussion. And some people will say, oh old people are bad at everything, don't let 'em drive. And other people will say, oh, how dare you. That's ageist. Let people do what they want. And all you learn by the end of that conversation is who's on what side. Now you can show that exact same photo to another audience and ask them, how might this person drive this car? And what you get is basically a design discussion. And some people are saying, what if we change the shape of the steering wheel? What if we move the dashboard? And by the end of that conversation what you've learned is several different ways that person might be able to drive that car. Not only changed a couple words in that whole question, but by changing the frame I change the entire thing. And what I like to do is to teach people when they have a question like that, a should question, to try to think about, well what problem is that question trying to solve?
So a bigger, better question around the senior citizen driving the car might be, how might we do a better job of moving people around? Cuz that's why the guy was in the car in the first place it was here. We wanted to be there. And if you frame it that way, things like public transportation around the table. So anytime if you're trying to do civil discourse, anytime you're faced with a binary should question, what you wanna do is say, well, what problem is that should question trying to solve? Right? With the senior citizen question, it's about moving people around safely. Well then let's just ask that because if we solve that question, if we figure out how to move people around safely, we don't even have to bother with the should senior citizens be allowed, right? Because we've already solved the problem of moving people around safely.
It is endemic to uncivil discourse, to haggle over solutions and sort of a hallmark of more smart democracy to think more about, well, what are we actually trying to achieve? Let's talk about and can we agree on what we're trying to achieve? That's critical. But if we can agree on what we're trying to achieve. Okay. Now we can talk about the best path there versus just focusing on this one path and being like, well, if you're pro this path, you're a racist and if you're anti this path, you're a hippie, or whatever the argument is
Brendan Jarvis:
When it comes to the war in Ukraine, how closely have you been following that
David Dylan Thomas:
Fairly? It's funny, my son who is 13 and is very much getting into geopolitics and history of conflict is actually even more up on it than I am. But I'm staying fairly abreast of the situation, at least the broad strokes.
Brendan Jarvis:
How do you feel or how have you seen the framing effect being used by the powers that have been in conflict with each other? For example, how have you seen in the media, the western media, clearly our media, how have you seen the Russian view on why they're doing what they're doing framed?
David Dylan Thomas:
Well, first of all, the framing is very much not the Russian people, it's Putin. And we see this from the news. We see this from people. It is fascinating to watch LinkedIn become as political as it has been. And it is, I've seen countless posts from folks in the Ukraine talking about how, Hey, this is my home office now and it's like the subway, or I just quit my job so that I can serve in the military or whatever it is. And then Russian folks saying, Hey, and opening line, I'm Russian. I hate this. Let me tell you why I hate this and screw Putin and all of that stuff. So that's one piece of the framing is very much, this is not about Russia versus Ukraine. This is about Putin versus Ukraine. And the other piece of framing, which I think is really interesting is Putin's framing, right?
Because what is at a bigger scale, what is fascinating about autocrats is the degree to which they rely on the framing effect to justify their actions. And for years, I wasn't unaware of this, I thought this was recent, but for years and years and years, Putin has been trying to frame the Ukraine as these Nazis who are hurt in Russians, which is a very old trope. Germany, in fact did a lot of damage, horrific damage to Russia during World War ii. So that is a very particular ghost he's resurrecting there that he knows is going to resonate even though it doesn't, cuz people see right through it. But you see why he's picking those particular metaphors. But from his perspective, and there's a great article, I forget who it was, but it's this woman who's been studying Putin for three different administrations sort of talking about it. But the frame you really get from his perspective is that it's almost like to him the Ukraine is almost like it's a guy, an ex-boyfriend, a toxic knocking, banging on the door of his ex-girlfriend and kicking down the door and basically, yeah, exactly. You want me back Basical saying, and Baly saying, if I can't have you, no one will. Right? And the no one being NATO [laugh] or the West or the EU and
Brendan Jarvis:
Or the ukranians.
David Dylan Thomas:
Exactly. Really you can't have yourself. Exactly, exactly. And fortunately as when he knocks down the door, the ex-girlfriends, there were the shotgun pointed right at him. But still it is like that's the vibe you're getting. And so you almost see the sense that from Putin's point of view that the framing is like, I owned you, how dare you. And what's interesting about the framing in fact is once you have it, it a way of making, it's a sensemaking tool to put it in UX terms, framing is a sense making tool. And what's dangerous is if you have the wrong frame, [laugh] interpret everything, whether it's meant that way or not. That's part of the reason the framing effect is so dangerous. But in terms of the Ukraine situation, again, the sense I'm getting is that the framing is very much from Western, brings very much around fears of World War III sympathy four and pride in the efforts and struggles of the Ukrainian people.
And this very autocratic sense of, okay, Putin's on his way to being in the next Hitler, or at least the next Stalin. And this is a problem. What's also fascinating though is the framing switches based on the action. Cuz if you'll remember right up until the day it happened, most people, not all, but most people are saying, yeah, but he is not going to invade though [laugh]. Even the Ukrainian people, there were, there's reports from on the ground and the Ukrainian people were like, it's kind of weirded out here. Cause everyone's just moving around business as usual. And to be fair, they turned on a dime the second they needed to. It's like, okay, let's get in the army, let's get everything mobilized. But it's fascinating to watch the framing change when the unexpected happens and it somehow becomes okay. You know what I mean? It's interesting.
Brendan Jarvis:
And that rapid switch has actually led to some interesting, and I say interesting and probably not the best choice of words, and it's some unfortunate expositions of bias in our media. And you've said in the past, and I'll just paraphrase that the job of journalism, journalism has two jobs, one of which is to point out when people are doing things wrong. And it's also, you've said that it's the job of journalism to point out when people are doing things. And I saw a segment of Trevor Noahs recently where he had put the spotlight on a number of white journalists who are lamenting Putin's invasion of Ukraine. And they were saying things about the people fleeing various cities in the Ukraine such as, and I'll quote now, they look like any normal European family that you would live next door to. And this is a relatively civilized, relatively European city where you wouldn't expect that. And then that journalist goes on to contrast that against cities in North Africa or cities in the Middle East. And Trevor Noah took particular issue with this way in which white journalists were framing this conflict and actually didn't pull any punches here and framed what they were saying as racists as they were racist. And what they were saying was racist. Are they racist?
David Dylan Thomas:
Well, yes, but I was going to try to fudge it a bit of, well, yeah, now with the caveat that racist is not a binary state. It's not like I could be like, okay, you're racist, you scored P ra ra race, race pH of 8.4, so you're over the line. But yeah, I find that to be a racist opinion. So here's the thing, and I've been like, this is where I get myself into trouble here. I have been biting my tongue because I sincerely feel for what the Ukrainian people are going through right now. And I sincerely admire the force of their resistance and sincerely think Putin is doing 'em dirty. But I have been biting my tongue over the response to that versus the response to say, Ethiopia, which I have ancestry in Ethiopia, my dad's from Ethiopia, and that horror show that's been going on for over a year now.
And nobody said shit, there was no, none of this outpouring. And granted, it's not exactly the same thing, but it's pretty horrible. And it is about invasion and it is about people suffering and it is about refugee, it's about all that stuff. But nobody said anything, right? Cause a, it's not the day players, everybody knows who Putin is. Nobody knows who the president or the prime minister of Ethiopia or to Gray, all that stuff. It's so, it's sort of not the top tier Grammy award-winning artist. It's sort of the folks with the mixtape, right? But it's also, they're also Africa. Let's, let's be honest. And the proof in the pudding is it did not take long at all for the black people living in Ukraine to be treated differently than the white people living in Ukraine. [laugh] literally the, there's a caste system of first the white Ukrainians, then the Indian people living there, then the black people living there.
And it's just like, oh man, racism finds a way. I mean, I gotta tell you, not too long ago, right before this happened, there was a black medical illustrator who started making illustrations of black people in. And we didn't have that. We did not have black medical in medical illustrations of people who were black, which leads to, we could do a whole other podcast about bias in medicine. But he's in the Ukraine and as soon as I heard he's in the Ukraine, I'm like, Ooh, I feel for this guy cuz this is while the buildup was happening. And I'm like, oh, I hope he's going to be okay. And then I'm looking at this stuff, it's like, man, even if he managed to try to get into line to get out, he might not have gotten out. Why? Cuz he's not Ukrainian, which okay, he's not a Ukrainian citizen, but he is living there.
And then the other ones where it's like, oh yeah not only can't you leave, but you gotta fight. And it's like, come on. And again, it's complicated, right? Cuz on the one hand I really do feel for the Ukrainian people, but that's not a hall pass to be racist, right? And we have to deal with those that these issues are complex, these issues are intertwined. But absolutely that framing, that's that that's a very old bias. It's a very old framing of there's refugees and then there's white refugees and it's a very different thing, right? Yeah, I could go on. But yes, the short answer is yes, that's an extremely racist point of view and a very old racist point of view.
Brendan Jarvis:
I thought Trevor, I was quite at when he also pointed out that up until about 80 years ago, it was Europe's thing to cause massive wars that led to millions of people dying. So the sort of shock and surprise of these journalists is really exhibiting that they've got a very short memory when it comes to Europe's role and conflict and killing Europeans, killing other Europeans and everybody else. That's collateral damage that gets wrapped into that. What's, but I was curious about
David Dylan Thomas:
This. Well yeah I do. So this, I wanna make a recommendation to our listeners here today. There is a documentary called Exterminate All the brutes. And it is more than a documentary, it is itself a framing device. And if you watch it, it all of this starts to make more sense. But basically it's the story of imperialism and trying to explain how is it that imperialism and genocide are banal, like shockingly, it happens a lot. How can that possibly be that one group of humans could routinely try to wipe out entire groups of other humans? And one of the points, the key points the film makes is that in order to commit something that atrocious, like the genocide of the entire Western hemisphere during colonial, the early colonialism, you don't need better technology. You don't need germs. What you need is the will to do it.
Genocide is hard work. It's sickening, but it's really hard work. So how do you convince someone to do that? You tell them a story, you tell them a story about what they have belongs to you, you tell a story about how they are not even, they're not human. In fact they're probably going to go extinct anyway. So the best you could do is either educate them to be your servants or maybe just help them move along, but you tell them a story that makes them feel like they're justified in doing what they do. It's the same framing we were talking about for that framing device that makes it okay for you to go in and wipe out Native Americans and all of these systems, cuz we haven't even talked about systems yet. All the systems that support it, you can then use on your own people. And they make a very clear point, which again, we know this, it's never about not knowing, we know this, that Hitler looked very closely at how Americans treated Native, how Europeans treated Native Americans when he was figuring out how he was going to do World War II or how he was going to do genocide. That is very much, he didn't come up that on his own. He learned it by, he learned it by watching us.
So yeah, that shock [laugh] at, oh my God, how can they do all of this? It's like, well the same way they did it before and the same way they did it to people who didn't look like them before
Brendan Jarvis:
And we're at a very well, it's easy to say who knows what might happen. But it feels like we're at a very important moment in history where something like this has been going on behind the scenes in other places around the world, as you've quite rightly pointed out, and may very well start to go on in a lot more view in Europe, just given the attention that our media is placing on this particular conflict. We very appear to be very poor learners from history. All humans seem to learn very poorly from the mistakes of the past. What is it that separates the cognitive biases that we all suffer from, that we are 95% unaware of from them generating into the isms that we experience. And in particular, we've been speaking about racism here. So at what point are these two things correlated? And if so, at what point does one tip from just being someone who's suffering from a bias who may be able to overcome that into someone who is actually racist? Is this a matter of intent? Is this part of the same spectrum? How do these two things relate, if at all?
David Dylan Thomas:
So there's a couple questions there. So when does a bias become anm? And the answer is scale on, really the answer is profit, right? So why does Columbus even bother trying to seek a trade route to Indians? Stumble upon the West Indies cause the original trade route, cuz there was an original trade route had been taken over by a bunch of brown people. The Muslims took those spice routes. So the only recourse is to try to find another route. And his particular one, no leads 'em leads 'em somewhere else. The reason you tell that story, hey they've got what you want, they don't deserve it. They're not even human is that want part? They've got something you want land, spice, labor, whatever it is, it's a story you tell. So you don't have to actually work for anything. It's a story you tell. So it's okay to rob people and steal stuff and kill people and take what they have.
It's covetousness, right? It's scaled, systematized, coveting. And that's when it goes from being a bias. Well, and it feeds itself, right? Because telling that story enough times you create patterns, you tell stories about, well this is what black people are like and this is what white people are like. And those stories generate patterns and those patterns generate behaviors which themselves generate stories. And the reason we don't learn from history is that we always reinterpret it. We take this horrible thing that happened and we reinterpret it as, oh the lesson to take from World War II isn't that if you treat people horribly somehow that's going to find its way back into treating people who look like you horribly. And that the problem is treating people horribly. No, we say, oh no, this is about evil. In a weird way, the worst story we told about World War II was that it was about evil and there was evil, but that wasn't the point.
The point was people tell stories about how they're superior to other people and that doesn't just happen in world Wars. And it's interesting for a little while we did take that a little bit to heart cuz you'll notice there's an anti monopolistic approach to governing that happens in the US around the same time because it's, its fascism. We don't like monopolies because monopolies are consolidating power and it's bad to consolidate power For a little while we took that lesson, and you'll see not to go too far, Phil, but a company like Walmart would basically be illegal then [laugh]. Just the certain practices are just illegal at that time. But in any case, the reason we're not learning from history in those cases is because it doesn't fit the narrative we'll adhere to the narrative and change whatever story comes out in the news, will eventually bend toward whatever that narrative is.
Did the same thing with the financial crisis, right? Oh it's just a few bad actors, but the good guys came in and cleaned it all up and now we're back on track and that approach. So that's why you're getting that. So when the original bias it, it's a chicken or the egg thing because the bias gets enhanced to justify the system and justify the thing. And as it does that you get the ism. But yeah, it's a scaled version of the bias in order to make a lot of money usually. Now. So that was the first part of your question. What was the second part?
Brendan Jarvis:
Well, let's actually come to that scaling of a bias into ANM and let's stay on racism. Cause I feel this is, well clearly it's an important topic to go into and it's one that doesn't necessarily get enough depth and attention pay to it, not at least in the media that I've been consuming. And you've said many insightful things about race and civil discourse and joining the dots between the two of those things. And one of those things, and I'll just quote you now, is how we talk about race as hierarchical when it comes to racial discussions. We are very good at calling out bad actors and saying, you did wrong. That was wrong, you shouldn't have done it. Which again, very important to continue to do that. But if we stop there, we are going to have a problem. And it sounded like to me that you were suggesting that if all you have is a hammer when it comes to discussing racism and sexism and all the other isms that need to be discussed and need to be put in the past, quite frankly, everything looks like a nail.
David Dylan Thomas:
Yeah. And it's funny at the time I didn't know it, but what I was talking about is restorative justice. So I think part of the reason we deeply fear being called a racist, being called a sexist and why we resist definitions. I'm forgetting who came up with this, but I think it's the person who at right for Joti said the definition of a racist sexist is you are benefiting from that system. So by that definition, I am a sexist, the reason, part of the reason we resist and feel so uncomfortable with those monikers is that at least in the west and especially in America, that crime can only be punished. And committing a crime makes you a criminal. And if you're a criminal, the only option is to punish you. So either I shun you from society or I obliterate you completely. Right? So somehow or another, I have to remove you from society.
I put you in jail, I kill you. No, yeah, there is no redemption arc. It's not offering. There's no redemption arc. There was no actual, which is funny because America loves redemption. Redemption stories. We just don't hate redemption. But no, we like the term cancel, right? It's a very final binary term. Once you are canceled, there's no renewal. No, you are no longer a human who can change. You're done. That's it. And it's easier, right? It's easier to process that. It's easier to say. I mean, I am a big Joss Whedon fan and when all this stuff started coming up about Joss Whedon, I was in a quadri. So there's a thing called zero risk bias, which is this way of thinking where it's like I need to eliminate all risks that anything can harm me and I'll go to great ends. Ridiculous, absurd ends that actually cause more harm to eliminate it, right?
But it's a way of the mind saying, Hey, I don't wanna think about this. It is so much easier not to think about this. And so when the news started coming out about Joss Whedon, that's the thing, nothing of how much worse it got. Eventually I was like, oh crap, I need to burn every D V D, Buffy DVD V d I have ceremonial and just destroy every shred of anything that he, that's ever even been touched by Joss Whedon. Or I'm put in the position of defending someone who is abusive to women. And I'm like, I don't like either of those options, but those are my only options cuz it's impossible to have a nuanced relationship with pop culture.
That's the space we're in. And so what's, and it's an old space because if you look at our actual criminal justice system, that's how it behaves. Especially against black people, [laugh], all of that comes from somewhere. Nothing is new. So what's been really interesting to me is to watch the rise of this idea of restorative justice. A completely different approach to thinking about trespassing, of doing the wrong thing. To say, hey, maybe it is in part the community's responsibility that this has happened. Maybe that action, that behavior that we did not, is not solely the result of some inherently evil person going back to that the evil discussion. But is in fact a series of circumstances and behaviors that emerge from lots of different places, including how that person was growing up the society they live in, the opportunities they do or don't have, literally do they have enough to eat?
All of these things, these myriad things result in a behavior which is a much more realistic way of looking at behavior. Especially if we are saying, Hey, 95% of that stuff you didn't really think about truly to begin with. And to say, we are going to sit in a circle now and talk about what do you owe us? What do we owe you? Not for nothing. That's also a more indigenous way of thinking about it, at least for a lot of different cultures. But that now, to put your phrase that provides an offering that says, okay, we acknowledge and if you're ready to acknowledge what you did was harmful, you caused harm. So let's go to the person who was harmed and then give them some say in what this means going forward. Let's go to the community and see what they say and what this means going forward.
But there is a forward, that's the point. And when we have conversations that are just about are you racist or not? That's why I hesitate to say, oh that person is racist. Cuz that's a death sense. That's sort of like saying, okay, you've got inoperable cancer. Oh well let's just wait for you to die, right? No, you're a person and you do some things that are racist, you do some things that are anti-racist, you do some things that are sexist, you do some things that are not feminist, we are not monoliths. It would be so much easier, believe me, if we could think of ourselves as monoliths and just go around labeling racist, not racist, racist, not racist, oh my god, life would be so much easier. But it's not. So if we are going to deal with human beings realistically as what human beings, the mess, the total hot mess that human beings and human relationships are, we need to it. It's going to be messy, right?
Brendan Jarvis:
And it is messy. It's proving to be messy. And it's almost the discussion of our time. And you've said something else that I thought was really insightful and I'll quote you again, which is, you can't think out loud about race, you just can't. But if you can't, you just don't get the same innovation. Those ideas and aspects and oh, I hadn't considered that before. So when it comes to those white journalists that clearly either weren't thinking or were thinking out loud when it came to the way in which they were juxtaposing the conflict in Ukraine with other conflicts around the world where the people aren't white, clearly a problem. But what can we do when we run into these expositions of bias, racism that we see out there other than hammering them, you know, spoke about the cancel and the finite nature of the cancel. Now how do we reframe this way in which we are approaching the messiness that is people to encourage the kind of behavior that is actually going to enable us to solve this problem. This is a problem, it needs to be solved, it's a wicked problem. But how do we do that? How do we change behavior without canceling people? I
David Dylan Thomas:
Think you going back to the methodology I was talking about before, which is to say that what is the goal behind the question? We have to decide whether what we want is safety or inclusion. Cuz you can't have both. Inclusion is not safe. Inclusion is not comfortable. And when I say safety, I don't mean safety as in I don't want that black cop to shoot me. I mean safety in terms of I want to not think about the world. I want to be safe from uncomfortable feelings and uncomfortable people. So I think there's a discussion to be had about mitigating harm first and foremost. Which is why whenever I talk about this I insist I don't want people to stop calling people off or doing bad stuff. That's not the solution either. It's more saying, okay, once you've called them out, what do we do next?
What is our goal? What is the point of calling them out to reduce harm? Yes. But then, because if you're just reducing harm, best you can hope for is a bureaucracy where people going around trying not to look like they're causing harm. And that never ends well. It's to say, okay, where are we trying to, are we, where are we going? What are we trying to get to? What does that just world look like? Can we agree that what we want is a just world and that's not a given? We have to have that discussion. We have to say, is that what you actually want? I think a lot of people do, but I think a lot of people do, but don't necessarily know what that means, what that implies. But if we can get at least to, I want to talk about what a just world looks like.
Okay, let's have that discussion and that discussion is going to involve canceling from some folks for a time and saying, Hey, I gotta take you off the board cuz you're causing too much harm. And we gotta figure out why that is and how that is. And first and foremost put out the fire. But then, okay, how do we build something? I'll give you a great actual, I think metaphor here. So there's a group called, unfortunately they're no longer around, but it was called Architecture for Humanity. And their whole thing was to go into disaster zones and try to build back better. That was the whole point. And the reason they even existed is because most relief efforts when there was some sort of disaster is to rebuild what was there already. The inherent flaw on that is if it was not resilient enough to not fall down when the first hurricane hit, when the next hurricane comes, it's going to fall down again.
So architecture for humanities approach was to say, okay, we are going to come here and we're going to stay here for oh maybe five, six years. Because that's how long it takes to create resiliency. And resiliency isn't just about building a better building, it's about what they learned actually over time. It's about economics. It's actually about having a stable, diverse economic structure that is resilient against this thing or that thing that's as important as any of the other pieces. And education too for that matter. So what cancel culture is kind of like, okay, hurricane hit, let's build back the thing that got pretty much the same way. It was like you're basically trying to achieve status quo in a sense. Instead of saying keep the barbarians at the gate, keep out the racists. Architecture management saying, okay, we canceled that racist, but what are we going to build so that the racist doesn't come back? Or so that we don't generate more racists. You figure out where the races are coming from, what circumstances are making that the better choice for people. Cuz that is a choice people are making strike at the root under the circumstances they're in. That's the choice that makes sense.
Brendan Jarvis:
And if they had better information, they may not make that same
David Dylan Thomas:
Choice better. I'd say better, more important, better circumstances, better environments. I mean the other piece that I think is important to think about here, it's only one piece, but is addiction theory. So I'll throw this in there and I know we gotta go in a minute, but I wanna hit this cause I think it's important. So they looked at people who were coming out of hate groups. People used to be in hate groups and are rehabilitating. And one of the factors that they saw was that it is very similar to people who are dealing with addiction and are recovering from addiction where the addiction is hate instead of oxy. But it's a lot of the same steps. You have to acknowledge that you've lost control over this and all of that stuff. One of the theories and only one of them, but one of the theories about addiction is a more environmental one.
So the old theory is going back to framing. There was a liberal kind of thought about addiction was that, oh, it's just purely chemical. As soon as the cocaine hits here knows that's it. Your body needs cocaine and you're done. And we need to deal that with it. That way. There is the sort of more conservative willpower image of addiction, which is like, oh, if you actually had any willpower, you wouldn't take the Coke, you wouldn't drink the alcohol. It's about your willpower. Then there's an environmental one, which goes back to a wonderful experiment called Rat Park. So you may have heard of the experiments where you have a rat and a cage and it has water and it has water that has, what is it? Yeah, it has water that is cocaine in it and then other food and whatnot. And the rattle just keep pressing the button for the cocaine and eventually just dive starvation.
Cause that's all it's doing is having cocaine. And they're like, oh, clearly addiction is purely chemical, blah blah, blah. And then someone took a look at that experiment and said, where were you keeping the rat again? And a cage? Okay. So he said, all right, let me do a little variation. And he created what's called Rat Park, which is a big old habitat full of all the things that rats including access to other rats. And they did the same experiments like regular water, cocaine, water. And the rats drank the regular water and it was like, oh, this is interesting. And they looked at this around the same time they looked at Vietnam soldiers American soldiers in Vietnam coming back and when they were in Vietnam, horrible heroin addictions. And they're like, oh my god, we have all these soldiers coming back from Vietnam, we're going to have a horrible heroin epidemic in the states.
And it didn't happen. When they got back, they kind of kicked it and it was like, oh right. It was horrible for them in Vietnam when they got back here and it got mildly better [laugh] this, there's a lower percentage of addiction but it's this notion that the environment has a very big part to play in addiction. So if you look at the places [laugh], where we are seeing people feel threatened, and we look at those environments like the environmental factors that are going on, and again, I come back to just simple things like guaranteed income because when people feel more secure, they're less likely to act out and look for people to attack, to explain their insecurity. All of these pieces I think come together. I forget what the original question was, but yeah, that's where we ended up.
Brendan Jarvis:
So that we can have useful conversations. Conversations that allow us to move forward on these topics like racism, these problems that we need to solve. It seems to me that we first need to believe in being civil and then we also need to believe in having conversation and we need to join those two things together. But if we are going to do that, and I know you've got some rules here that need to be agreed to, what are the rules? What is the game that we all need to agree that we are playing before we can actually have a civil discourse about these topics?
David Dylan Thomas:
Yes, I have these three rules that I think will help. One of them is neither of us has the answer, right? Because I think we walk into these conversations sometimes being like, it is my job to convince you that I'm right, which presupposes that I have the answer. You don't. You have the wrong answer. I have the right answer. So my job for the rest of the conversation is to get you to agree to my answer. And if you're walking into the conversation with that exact same attitude, guess what? We're going to fight. We're not going to discuss anything, we're just going to fight. Which if that's what you want, great, but let's agree that's what you want. If you actually want a conversation, let's agree that neither of us is the answer. Cuz if we did, we wouldn't be in this mess [laugh], right? If the answer was so glaringly obvious, everybody knew it.
So I think that's sort of one of the things. And what that assumes then is that we're both going to learn something before this conversation is over. And that in fact, that is the goal that we learn something. Can we both agree that we're here to learn? That is a much more humble place to move from as well. The second one, which is related is neither of us will win. We are very competitive and we frame our conversations that way, that there's going to be a winner and a loser. Which again, if you're going to fight, sure, but if you actually wanna have a discussion, discussions require agreement, yes and ending, right, they're a dance, not a conflict. And so you have to say, well, neither of us is going to, we're not walk away with a winner here and winning isn't what we're here to do, but it's also not helpful.
Winning doesn't actually solve the problem. It just makes one of us feel better until the problem wears its likely head again because we were too busy winning to actually solve it. So again, in America, we're obsessed with winning, we're obsessed with the horse race, just look at our electoral co coverage. But we're not so much about the problem solving and that cuz that requires more humility. And then the final thing is we are, the third rule is we are here to create something new and that assumes the best in each other. And again, when we enter these conversations, we often assume there is no best to bring out in the other person. They are evil, they are wrong, they're misguided, they are lacking, they are wanting, there is nothing of value there. All I can do actually, to be honest, it's a lot like that colonialist mindset.
Oh you poor thing, let me train you up so that you can follow my ways. Certainly I have nothing to learn from you, you have to learn from me. I think whether we're liberal or conservative, we very often walk into conversations with that mindset versus, oh, we have the opportunity to make something new, which means that we are both going to contribute to this thing that has never existed before. Because again, if it did exist, we probably wouldn't be in this mess. So let's make something different that can only come about because my uniqueness and your uniqueness are contributing to it. And those are not easy things to agree to. But if you can agree to them, the odds of having a civil, and I would even say productive conversation go up and immensely.
Brendan Jarvis:
What a great place to end our conversation on today, Dave. It's really been a substantial and a hugely valuable conversation for me personally, I really wanna say thank you for being so generous and so brave with sharing your stories and insights with me today.
David Dylan Thomas:
Thank you. And thank you for giving me the opportunity. I rarely get to cut loose like this, so thank you.
Brendan Jarvis:
We should do it again. Absolutely. You're most welcome, Dave. And look at some, it's clearly you're a busy person, you've got a lot going on. Where can people find out more about you? About your book Designed for cognitive bias, about the cognitive bias podcast, and of course your new podcast. I've been thinking about where's the best place for them to do that.
David Dylan Thomas:
All your one stop shopping is at DavidDylanThomas.com. You can find out about my upcoming talks my podcast hire me to give a talk where you are. All that good stuff is at DavidDylanThomas.com.
Brendan Jarvis:
Thanks Dave, and to everyone that's tuned in, it's been great having you here as well. Everything that Dave and I have covered will be in the show notes, including where you can find him and all of the good stuff that we've spoken about. If you enjoyed the show and you wanna hear more from world class experts in UX, design and product management, don't forget to leave a review on the podcast, subscribe to it. And also, if you feel that these kind of conversations would be of value to someone in your circle, in your friends group, and in your list of colleagues, please pass the podcast along to them and let's get it into the areas as well. If you wanna reach out to me, you can find me on LinkedIn, I'll put a link to my profile at the bottom of the show notes as well. Or you can head on over to thespaceinbetween.co.nz, that's thespaceinbetween.co.nz. And until next time, keep being brave.

David Dylan Thomas

Rising Above Our Biases in Design

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