The Biasing Effects of Personal Experience
by Benjamin Studebaker
One of the most common assumptions around is the notion that the only way to truly understand something is to be part of it. It is said that the best way to learn about life is to live it. This idea has tremendous influence–it causes method actors to attempt to directly experience what their characters experience, it causes people to go on trips or to do things purely for “the experience”, and most importantly, it has tremendous influence over how people think about politics, both for the left and for the right. The left scolds well-off politicians, who are assumed to have no conception of what it means to be poor and to suffer. The right scolds young people and ivory tower academics for not directly experiencing the welfare systems they praise, or the private systems they denigrate. There is a kernel of truth in both criticisms, but that’s about it.
It is true that sometimes people’s political beliefs are the product of an incorrect understanding of the way the world is. British Chancellor George Osborne thinks the British welfare state is very generous and that it is very easy to live off of a welfare income. As a result, he believes that there is room to cut welfare spending without causing widespread suffering. Suppose he is incorrect about this. One way to potentially change his view would be for him to live for a time on a welfare income, to directly experience what poverty in his country is like. However, while this might be a very easy way of making the point, it may very well not be the best way, and it might only serve to produce a different problem in his thinking.
Personal experience is a blunt instrument. It provides a very powerful anecdotal case, but it carries with it all the potential flaws anecdotal arguments have. Anecdotes provide us with only one perspective, a perspective that is limited and may not apply widely to most cases. When it is our own perspective, it is also very difficult to dispel or counter.
Here’s an example. I have had the personal experience of being a student in the American public education system. I was in that system for over a decade. However, having been a part of that system misleads me when I think about how the American public education system might be improved. I have the tendency to make two big mistakes:
- I tend to assume that other students have experienced the American public education system in a similar way.
- I tend to assume that the student perspective is disproportionately valuable to understanding the system; I fail to show equal concern for the system’s other participants.
I experienced the American public education system as a gifted kid with active parental participation in a reasonably well-funded suburb. I cannot fathom what it is like to be a kid of below average intelligence with less active parents in an inner-city school. However, because I was a student, I will still catch myself thinking that I have some kind of privileged knowledge, gained through personal experience, that gives me special insight into how all schools should be run for all students. I have no such privileged knowledge; in reality, my having been a student has skewed my view of how schools should operate. My ideas regarding education are consequently biased toward the perspective of students who are similar to me. I give unequal concern to students who differ, not because I don’t care about them, but because I wrongly overestimate the similarity between my experience and the average student’s.
Not only do I make errors in understanding how other students experience school, but having been a student causes me to privilege student perspectives in general over the perspectives of say, teachers, parents, or administrators. As a result, I only see one piece of what the education system does with any accuracy, yet my having had “personal experience” causes me to believe I understand the system in its totality. Personal experience causes me to have more confidence in my perspective even as it ensures that this perspective will be more flawed.
This is not to say that I have no good ideas about education, or that everything I learned through personal experience was valueless. Nonetheless, it is harder for me to accurately check all of the biases that personal experience produced in my thinking, to prevent them from corrupting my attempts at full understanding. I would be better off if I had learned about how the American public education system works in a different way, if I had not directly experienced it with my limiting perspective.
And of course, it’s not just students who have an incomplete picture of the education system–teachers, parents, and administrators each only have a part, but believe on some level that they have the whole. And of course, it’s not merely the education system in which this happens. All personal experiences bias us in this same way. Doctors, patients, nurses, hospital administrators, and the like, all think they have a privileged understanding of the healthcare system due to personal experience, when in fact, all of these groups are worse off for having been a part of it. Employees and employers both think they understand the businesses they’re involved in better because they have worked in them, but on some level, both are more confused than an outside is.
That said, how else could we learn about systems aside from participation? And surely there is some work that can only be learnt through experience? Yes, the only way to be a good doctor is to gain experience practicing the craft of doctoring, and the only way to be a good teacher is to gain experience practicing the craft of teaching. But while experience of a job may make you better at doing that job, it doesn’t necessarily make you any better at understanding the system that your job is a part of.
We can imagine an ideal way of learning about a system, one that minimizes the bias picked up along the way. Say we could enter into a system with no prior knowledge of that system. We would then begin to accumulate experiences of how that system works by listening to the participants in that system. We would look at data that amalgamates the aggregate experiences of people in the system. We would attempt to understand who is benefiting from the system as it presently operates and who is harmed by it, in what ways, and to what extents. We would need some understanding of what it is to “benefit” and what it is to be “harmed”, so that we would have the ability to sympathize or empathize with the various actors within the system. Most importantly, we would need to show equal concern for the interests of all of the participants. We would not privilege any perspective in our inquiry–we would not pay more attention to what say, administrators say about a system than we would its employees, or the people it serves. In this way we would divorce ourselves and our perspective from the analysis and attempt to conduct it impartially.
Obviously it is impossible ever to achieve the ideal. Left wingers always come into any dispute between employers and employees assuming on some level that the perspective of the employee is more legitimate, and right wingers always do the same but for the employer. Nonetheless, it is a standard to which we should constantly attempt to meet. We should always try to show equal concern, and to take all perspectives equally seriously when we try to understand how a system works and how we might improve it.
Teachers often complain that politicians analyzing the education system pay too much attention to the claims of administrators or other non-teacher educational “experts”. It is often suggested that politicians are unqualified to determine how the education system ought to work because they do not have the personal experience of teaching. The teachers have identified a real problem–the politicians are showing unequal concern, privileging some perspectives at the expense of the teaching perspective. The answer, however, is not to go the other way, it is not to work only from the teaching perspective, but to attempt to come to a mutually constitutive understanding of all of the perspectives equally, and thereby come to a solution that tackles the whole problem, and not the problem from one point of view.
Right wingers don’t need to experience poverty, and left wingers don’t need to experience what it’s like to run a business. They need merely to acknowledge that what they have experienced has biased them, has caused them not to give equal consideration to the interests of the people their political positions affect, and to attempt constantly to adjust for that, to remedy it. Your average voter doesn’t have the time to go through that exercise. Your average voter votes his perspective, his prejudice. As a result, we have a handful of parties each of which does not attempt to build a good society for the benefit of all, but merely a society that benefits the portion of the population that comprises its voting bloc. For this reason, democracy is doomed to mediocrity and failure.
Benjamin Studebaker 
At the same time, direct experience is a crucial way in which we identify and understand social problems. Sociology is a discipline that frequently relies on interviews or participant observation in order to understand social systems; those experiences augment, not limit, our understanding.
When we interview or observe, we do not directly participate. There is a key distinction between receiving information secondhand, where we are somewhat divorced from its origins and capable of independently analyzing it, and taking our own personal experiences seriously as themselves informative.
[…] want to reply to an article by Mr. Studebaker on the role of experience in forming worthwhile political judgements. The force […]
Response here:
http://www.regrez.com/blog/2013/06/08/experience-values-and-politics-part-i/
Interesting thoughts, but I must disagree. While interpretive efforts are of course not inherently free of bias, they are free of the specific forms of bias that are generated by direct personal experience. The impossibility of ever being truly impartial does not make impartiality any less valuable a standard against which we measure ourselves. The visceral, emotional experiences you praise are among the most misleading–by inspiring a knee-jerk, instinctive response, they silence thinking. Taking children to Auschwitz emphasizes the impact of the suffering, but it does not help children to understand how it was that the Holocaust came to happen. If anything, it prevents that understanding, as the power of the emotional experience causes people to close their minds to understanding the thought processes and the motivations of those whom they are encouraged to dismiss as wholly malevolent. A certain level of detachment from the horror of genocide is necessary to understand it completely–we must understand not merely the perspective of the victims, but the perspective of the people who committed the deed, and those who allowed it to happen. Mindless outrage is not useful.
Direct personal experience can be useful in many other activities in which an emotional response is requisite (such as the viewing of art, as you rightly note) or in which an individual is seeking to develop a specific skill that requires practice, but not in theorizing our politics.
Though I see you are planning a Part 2, which may further develop the point, I am not convinced by the argument as it stands.
Knee-jerk reaction point is important. Will develop a full response tomorrow after I get some sleep! – but suffice to say at this stage that I believe such reactions are caused by a lack of engagement rather than too much of it! Detachment point is also important – do emotions block out critical reflection or induce it when it otherwise would not take place? I will follow up by arguing the latter…
Surely using emotions to get people to pay attention to something they would otherwise ignore is mere demagoguery, the manipulation of people who are disinclined to otherwise pay attention for the political objectives of the manipulator. People who are genuinely interested in politics and make a life of studying it have no need for attention-grabbing gimmicks.
http://www.regrez.com/blog/2013/06/09/experience-values-and-politics-part-ia/
Part I(a)
In this addendum you’re attacking a straw man. I am not arguing that you cannot attempt to correct misconceptions about the way the world is through direct personal experience–you can, but doing so will involve biasing yourself unnecessarily.
In for instance, the Hitchens case, Hitchens comes to believe that waterboarding is torture through direct personal experience, and we can argue that is view of waterboarding is consequently improved. However, the way Hitchens comes to this new opinion is not by weighing the perspective of the person being waterboarded against the perspectives of those doing the waterboarding, and seeing who has the right understanding of the effects involved. Instead he comes to this opinion through a traumatic emotional experience that causes him to wholly embrace the perspective of the person being waterboarded. His bias is reversed rather than corrected. In almost no situation is any one perspective sufficient for understanding a political situation, and consequently personal experience is always too simplistic to lead to good theory. It might cause one to take a view that is desirable, but only in a very emotionally manipulative, intellectually vacuous way, one which leads to wrong opinions on other issues in other contexts.
Hitchens would have been better off if he had read about waterboarding with an open mind, and attempted to impartially consider the various conflicted accounts of it. In the same way, your CEO is best served not by doing the jobs of his employees in order to experience what they experience, but by impartially examining what they do second-hand, by reading statistics or feedback or what have you. The fact that some people are too closed-minded to really reflect in this way impartially, that some people are unwilling or unable to check their biases, is not evidence that they need direct personal experience, it is evidence that they are not very good at political theory. Like any other skill, ability to theorize politically varies across the population. Not everyone does it particularly well. Hitchens appears to have been unable or unwilling to consider seriously the possibility that waterboarding could be truly unpleasant. As a result, his theory was flawed from the start–he began with a bias that he declined to check.
Your point about moral intuitions opens up an entirely new front. I wholly disagree with the view that moral intuitions are valuable because they are the product of experience. I would say to the contrary that moral intuitions ought to always be suspect for precisely the same reason. When our theory contradicts our moral intuitions, it is entirely possible that the intuition is wrong, or that there is a contradiction within the theory that has not been identified.
The organ transplanting case is not an example of a case in which the intuition is wrong or the theory wrong, it is a case in which the hypothetical has been constructed in a misleading way. The case limits utility to the life/death question without considering the other components of human happiness that are part of the utilitarian theory. While it is more utile for 5 people to live than for 1 person to live, it is not more utile to live in a society in which one must be in perpetual fear of being killed for one’s organs. No population would tolerate that condition of fear–the public reaction would be the violent overthrow of that system, and the result would be tremendous harm. The organ transplant case attacks a straw man, because it assumes that utility is only about who lives and who dies in the very short term. Utility is about happiness–you can be alive and suffer in ways that are worse than dying, and preventing some deaths now can cause more deaths later.
Sorry – responded to this a little later than I would have liked to.
http://www.regrez.com/blog/2013/06/11/experience-value-and-politics-part-ii/
This pretty much wraps up my argument, as well as discussing active experience.
Likely to be a case of modus vivendi between us on this, but interesting nevertheless to read your views on the topic.
I claimed that you were attacking a straw man because you seemed to be construing my argument as claiming that personal experience exclusively biases–I didn’t claim that, I claimed that it necessarily entails bias that makes it a less effective way of learning about the world than indirect experience (reading the accounts of others/looking at statistics), so much so that the bias is more powerful than anything one learns. You deride indirect experience as “more reflection”, as if it was merely an internal conversation one carries out in one’s own mind. It is nothing like that–pursuing additional information with an open mind is very important, it’s just better if that information is approached analytically rather than through the emotional, limiting perspective of the self.
You misconstrue my point about Hitchens as well. I’m claiming that Hitchens is just as wrong to base his views on the morality of waterboarding on his own experience, which privileges the perspective of the victim, as he was beforehand! He has not reached the right conclusion through the second best means, he has reached an equal and opposite wrong conclusion by reversing his bias. He is just as biased as before, but in a direction you personally find more agreeable. His thinking on the issue is unimproved in quality. He traded a bias in favor of the beneficiaries of waterboarding for a bias in favor of its victims. His conclusion is just as emotional and just as valueless as it was before. It may even be of less value, if he had some defensible philosophical reason for not extending moral concern to the victims of waterboarding.
You then go on to straw man me severely–I specifically said that direct personal experience is very important when in a situation that calls for emotion (the viewing of art, for instance) or when attempting to learn a skill that requires practice (like playing a violin). I exclusively argued that direct personal experience was not useful when trying to theorize our politics. There are many other situations in which it is useful, and pointing those out does not attack my argument at all.
I’m not sure if you actually read what I posted…
I never once claimed that you were arguing that personal experience exclusively biases someones perspective. I interpreted you on your own terms: that bias arises because one exposes oneself to a particular situation and draws conclusions more generally on the basis of that situation. Your conclusion was that a *better* approach was to reason from a distance – not that this conclusion itself is free of bias, as I pointed out in my first post, and you yourself admitted. So my burden was to challenge whether it really was a *better* approach than utilising direct experience, or whether the danger of your bias made direct experience too risky, that is not a strictly preferred alternative.
What I showed was that (I am simplifying):
i) By reasoning at a distance, one blinds themselves to relevant information than cannot be obtained due to the paucity of description and imagination.
ii) The “danger” of bias does not invalidate the use of direct experience as relevant information to form judgement – it only invalidates incorrect interpretations given that information.
iii) So a preferred approach to shunning direct experience altogether is to expand one’s direct experience as far as possible, so as to maximise available information, and then apply an evaluation function accordingly which avoids the kind of fallacies you say are associated with direct experience (and the bias it entails), whereas in actual fact they are not embedded in the content but only the evaluation.
“He is just as biased as before, but in a direction you personally find more agreeable.”
Again you didn’t read what I said. I said only that Hitchens changed his mind, not that he reached an objectively right conclusion. He changed his mind based upon the expanded information set provided by direct experience. That’s the whole point…I knew perfectly well that your contention was that he simply biased himself in a different direction rather than reflecting on the issue. So I argued that:
i) Direct experience provides information that cannot be replicated through description, which may well be emotional – that is still relevant information.
ii) Bias does not stem from the content but from the evaluation based upon that content. So the fact that Hitchens experienced what waterboarding was like does not mean he was biased towards the ‘other’ direction in light of his experience. It only means his evaluation changed based upon new information.
“You then go on to straw man me severely”
I EXPLICITLY said that the argument about active experience was not in response to your post, which if you will recall, I typified as applying to passive experience. My points about active experience were in response to a rationalism applied more generally, not your argument.
Oh, I read everything you said, I just completely disagree with the notion that it is possible to separate out the bias of one’s own perspective from information obtained through that perspective. Human rationality is not capable of that gymnastic; involving yourself necessarily entraps yourself within the constraints of your perspective. It cannot be escaped, and to imagine it can is dangerous, because it sets one up to fail.
You suggest that my method ignores potential information–it certainly does do that, but only because obtaining that additional information will harm the conclusion more than it will help. The bias is stronger than the additional information and it will warp that additional information to serve the individual’s point of view rather than the community as a whole.
When you suggest that “knee-jerk” reactions are the product of not having experience rather than having it, you’re missing the point–the “knee-jerk” is not the result of insufficient direct experience, it is the result of insufficient thinking and examination of evidence. There are plenty of lay people who have adopted points of view unthinkingly, without undertaking either my analysis or your direct experience, and those people certainly are guilty of the “knee-jerk”. However, taking up my method relieves them of it while taking up yours only serves to intensify it, either in the direction it was in already, or in the opposite direction. One cannot, through direct experience, form an accurate understanding of the way a system works. It’s not a lesser method, or a secondary method, it is ultimately a wrong method. It negatively informs the theorist.
While you stated the “active experience” post was not a direct response to me, you nonetheless claimed that I shared in the rationalist perspective that maintains that you can learn to play a violin without playing it. You’ve consistently labelled what I advocate as “reflection”, when what I really advocate is the examination of indirect experience through a rigorous, bias-checking methodology. Philosophically, I am more of an empiricist than a rationalist, and I object to being wrongly categorized. All knowledge ultimately derives from experience, but it is the nature of the experience, whether it is direct or indirect, and the way in which that experience is analyzed, whether aspiring to impartiality or with the unimpeded bias of one’s own perspective, that is important.
“Human rationality is not capable of that gymnastic; involving yourself necessarily entraps yourself within the constraints of your perspective. It cannot be escaped, and to imagine it can is dangerous, because it sets one up to fail.”
Should a baseball team sack of all of its scouting staff in favour of a purely sabermetric approach on the grounds that direct experience with a potential target will lead to a biased judgement?
A baseball scout, whether he’s examining statistics or watching the player’s performance, is not evaluating the player based on direct personal experience. Statistics is not the only form of indirect experience–scouts can also watch film, watch a player in action, interview managers and trainers and others who are familiar with his game. A good scout takes all of this information on board and weighs it as impartially and objectively as he can. In this case, direct personal experience would be the player himself evaluating his owner performance or the performance of other players based on his own playing experience exclusively. Surely you agree that not every baseball player would make an effective scout, and the ones that would be good at it would be good at it not due to their direct personal experience of playing baseball but due to their ability to evaluate independently and objectively the ability of other players based on data, film study, etc. Just as theorizing how the education system should work is a different skill from teaching, administrating, or studying, scouting baseball players is a different skill from playing baseball. The latter is no guarantee of the former, and in reality possessing the latter only worsens one’s own ability to judge one’s own skill at the former.
Consider for instance Michael Jordan’s record as owner of the Charlotte Bobcats–Jordan has extensive experience as a basketball player and was arguably the best to have ever played, yet all that talent has counted for nothing when Jordan has attempted to evaluate player talent and make decisions regarding which players to sign or trade for. He’s been consistently abysmal at it, and his direct personal experience of playing only causes him to have a false sense of ability that further hampers his team’s success.