Blind Spot Bias

Most people I meet, and most people I talk to professionally, are on the surface just regular people doing the best that they can do to get on with their lives. But go a little deeper, and this is why the self-improvement industry is so large: there are many, many people who want a bit more out of their lives.

Often we are very good at being the person that others want us to be, and perhaps for some of us we live a life where we know something is missing. Regularly I talk to people who are stuck or feel trapped, often they can feel wounded by life events, and often they can’t seem to get over that painful situation.

The Layers We Construct

I also see people in my surgery who have assumed an identity that fits with the life they are leading. At times people can hide behind the identity they show to the rest of the world. Often in times of stress, this false front comes crashing down to reveal the pain and the problems underneath. People construct these identities in layers to create layers of protection. I metaphorically think of these layers a bit like that of onions, where there’s a fibrous hard outer skin and then multiple layers underneath.

Winnicott’s (1960) concept of the “false self” describes this beautifully. We develop a compliant, socially acceptable persona that interacts with the world while our true self, with its genuine needs and feelings, remains hidden and protected. The problem is that the more energy we put into maintaining the false self, the more disconnected we become from who we actually are.

This article is about some of the principles you need to accept to improve yourself. It’s about the importance of helping you look at some of your deeper flaws and peel back a few layers of that metaphorical onion. We also know that if you go a bit deeper, there may even be some lies that you may be telling yourself too, or there may be some truths you really don’t want to admit.

The Blind Spot Bias

There’s a cognitive bias called the blind spot bias, and this is simply the failure to recognise one’s own cognitive biases. And in broader terms, I’d say this is also the inability to recognise one’s problems and hang-ups too. You can see biases in others clearly, you can identify their flawed thinking easily, but your own? Those are invisible to you.

Pronin, Lin, and Ross’s (2002) research demonstrated this perfectly. They found that people are good at identifying bias in others but terrible at seeing it in themselves. Even after being taught about bias blind spot, even after acknowledging it exists, people still believed they were less biased than average. This isn’t ignorance, it’s a systematic inability to see our own distortions.

The thing is, failing to recognise that underlying conscious thought processes are biasing the decisions you make can have serious repercussions. There is definitely one thing for sure, there are always some blind spots in our knowledge. Nobody knows everything. How do you get to know what you don’t know? How do you find out what’s in your blind spot? And how do you make better decisions?

The Three Realisations

The first step is to realise that you have some blind spots in how you think and in your knowledge. This sounds obvious, but most people don’t actually believe this about themselves. They believe others have blind spots, but they themselves see clearly. This fundamental misconception prevents all growth.

Secondly, you have to accept that there are ways of thinking that are not healthy and are not doing you any good. Again, most people can identify unhealthy thinking in others but struggle to see it in themselves. Your defensiveness, your rationalisation, your victim mentality, your perfectionism, your people-pleasing, these might be obvious to everyone around you but invisible to you because they’re part of your identity.

Finally, life’s problems commonly come out of the blind spots you have in your thinking, and you can do something about it. This is the hopeful part. You’re not stuck with your blind spots forever. With effort, with feedback, with willingness to be uncomfortable, you can expand your self-awareness and reduce the areas of your thinking that you can’t see clearly.

I know a little bit about life’s problems, and I’ve figured out where these blind spots tend to sit. I want to give you the insight to put right some of the issues you may currently have by correcting biases in how you think and by giving you a few better mental shortcuts instead.

The more expert you become in any domain, the more likely you are to develop blind spots in that specific area. Kruger and Dunning’s (1999) research, while often misunderstood, showed that skilled individuals tend to underestimate how much others also know, while unskilled individuals tend to overestimate their own competence. Nobody is exempt from blind spots, however experienced they are.

When reading through the material in this library, you’ll begin to change, you will see what’s going on beneath a few of the layers you show to the rest of the world, and you’ll come a bit closer to finding out who you really are.

For some people, all they need is to find out a few of the pieces that are missing, whilst for others, it’s going to take a bit more work and effort to find themselves.

Further reading

• Pronin, E., Lin, D. Y., & Ross, L. (2002). The bias blind spot: Perceptions of bias in self versus others. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 28(3), 369–381.
• Kruger, J., & Dunning, D. (1999). Unskilled and unaware of it. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 77(6), 1121–1134.
• Winnicott, D. W. (1960). Ego distortion in terms of true and false self. In The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment.
• Dweck, C. S. (2006). Mindset: The New Psychology of Success.
• Grant, A. (2021). Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know.