Association Bias

In the last lesson, we talked about habitual inertia and how we want to build good habits that trigger automatically, without thinking. This happens when our mind connects a trigger with a practised response or behaviour. If this habit or response is practised enough, it happens under the radar of our consciousness. You don’t think about it. You just do it.

One of the things that governs this type of conditioning is a concept and a cognitive bias called Association Bias, which is the subject of this lesson. You can probably see that I’ve cobbled the name together from Charlie Munger’s Influence-from-Mere-Association Tendency — Munger’s version is the same idea, applied more broadly to how we judge people, brands and ideas by what they’re associated with rather than on their own merits. Understanding this will help you see why you do what you do, and more importantly, how to change it if what you’re doing isn’t working.

Association Bias is quite simply when one thing triggers another. When something triggers a memory, a feeling, a thought, a response, a behaviour or a habit. Some people never stop to notice that their responses are running on autopilot. What I want to get across in this lesson is that you need to get into the habit of reviewing your responses from time to time, if you want to avoid old behavioural responses and change your responses to better ones.

Let’s look at Association Bias in a bit more detail. There’s really only one thing you need to take from this lesson: get into the habit of noticing your automatic responses and asking whether they’re still serving you. That sounds simple, but most people get it wrong most of the time — largely because they’ve never stopped to notice they’re doing it at all.

Pavlov and his Drooling Dogs

Our brains automatically connect a stimulus, an object, a person, or even that person’s voice or behaviour, with an associated response. We’ve all heard of Pavlov’s dogs and how he showed that conditioned responses could be learned, deeply and durably, in the mind — or at least those of his dogs. It’s because our mind seeks associations, and our resulting behaviour reflects this. We make these associations because of what has happened to us in the past. The more often it has happened, the scarier, more painful, pleasurable or vivid the event, the more imprinted our associated response is.

In the right way, we can use Association Bias to kickstart our minds to the behavioural response or the feelings we want to perceive in any given situation. We can learn to respond the way we want by association. The trouble is that it can go wrong, and then it keeps going wrong as Association Bias causes us to make the same poor responses again and again. You’ve trained yourself to respond badly, and now you’re stuck in a loop. The good news, and the reason this matters, is that learned responses can be unlearned. Bouton’s research on extinction and relapse shows that conditioned responses are never simply erased, but they can be weakened and replaced by new learning — which is exactly what the rest of this lesson is about.

Conditioned Responses

We can become conditioned to respond negatively to events or people, or even to those that remind us of them, in the future. That generalisation is well documented — Watson and Rayner’s famous 1920 study showed that a conditioned fear response to one thing can spread to anything that merely resembles it. Not only are we in danger of responding in the wrong way in the wrong environment, but we’re also in danger of losing the choice in our response because association makes us respond automatically. You’re not choosing how to respond anymore. Your conditioning is choosing for you.

Association Bias allows us to act instinctively, to respond quickly, but also to respond incorrectly. We need to be aware of how we’re responding and consciously try to imprint how we want to respond instead. Self-awareness is a key trait for personal growth and self-improvement, and for now, just get into the habit of catching yourself responding in certain situations, especially when your response could be improved.

Someone who was betrayed by a partner responds to every new relationship with distrust. Someone who failed at something once responds to every similar opportunity with fear. They’re not responding to what’s actually happening now. They’re responding to what happened then, and they don’t even realise they’re doing it.

Imprint the Right Behaviours

To help imprint the right behaviour, reward yourself for doing the right thing — that’s what makes you more likely to keep doing it. If the associated response isn’t one you actually want to keep, no amount of triggering will make it stick in a good way. You could also do something small and unpleasant to discourage the response you don’t want, but kicking yourself in the shin in a business meeting doesn’t look too professional, and really, the point is to respond correctly, not simply to avoid responding at all.

There’s a well-established clinical technique built entirely around this idea, called systematic desensitisation, developed by Wolpe in the 1950s: pairing a feared or unwanted trigger, gradually and repeatedly, with a calmer response until the old association weakens and a new one takes its place. You don’t need a therapist’s office to use the underlying principle. Changing your life often means changing the way you respond and react, and starting to react the way you want to. With Association Bias, we can start doing this deliberately. But it takes work. It takes awareness. It takes deliberately creating new associations to replace the old ones. You can’t just decide to respond differently. You have to train yourself to respond differently, repeatedly, until the new response becomes automatic.

Negative Effects

Association Bias also means that if you aren’t aware of your responses, you could be digging holes for yourself every day through conditioned negative behaviour. You’re responding automatically, and your automatic response is making things worse, not better.

Often, Association Bias is why we blame others for the pain we’re in, and it’s why we shoot the messenger. And the lack of a good response is also why we sometimes put up with things we really shouldn’t if we want to make a change in our lives.

Positive Effects

Association bias, when used correctly, is about responding well to what happens. It is one of those automatic responses that can work for us; we need awareness, and we need to practise building our positive reactions and responses until they become automatic.

The key is in self-awareness. Once you see your conditioned responses for what they are, you can choose whether to keep them or change them. But you can’t change what you can’t see. Start watching yourself. Start catching your automatic responses. Start questioning whether they’re serving you or sabotaging you. And then deliberately start creating new associations that work for you, not against you.

Your brain will create associations whether you want it to or not. That’s how it works. That’s how it learns. The question is whether you’re going to let those associations happen randomly based on whatever experiences you’ve had, or whether you’re going to deliberately create the associations you want. The choice is yours, but only if you’re aware that there’s a choice to be made in the first place.

Further reading

• Munger, C. T. — The Psychology of Human Misjudgment
• Bouton, M. E. — Learning and Behavior: A Contemporary Synthesis
• Watson, J. B. & Rayner, R. (1920) — ‘Conditioned emotional reactions’
• Wolpe, J. — Psychotherapy by Reciprocal Inhibition
• Kahneman, D. — Thinking, Fast and Slow