Sample Sizes and Grey's Anatomy

I hope you take the opportunity to read Shonda Rimes' speech at the recent Human Rights Campaign Gala in Los Angeles. (https://medium.com/thelist/you-are-not-alone-69c1a10515ab)

Rimes is an award-winning television writer. For starters, can you say "Grey's Anatomy"? And it goes up from there.

She talks about the importance of seeing people both like her and unlike her on the small screen. She works hard to make that happen in her scripts. And she does that in full awareness of her own experiences as a detested outsider in her growing up years (and probably still to this day in some settings).

"No one is meaner," she told the crowd, "than a pack of human beings faced with someone who is different." We all know how true that is. And we all know how true that is for all of us--both on the receiving and the giving end. How can we respond? We can speak various mantras--"love and tolerance," "liberty and justice for all," "love your neighbor as yourself." These are important for our self-talk and our social talk.

We can also be more aware of our blinds spots. One blind spot is the similarity trap. We tend to care more for people who resemble us. We tend to give more credibility (and credit) to people who resemble us. We tend to extend more trust to people who resemble us. And we tend to care less for people who look and sound different from us. We tend to doubt the testimony of those whose lives are not like ours. We view strangers with suspicion, whether that wariness is justified by evidence or not. 

And all of these assessments are based on superficial similarity. None are based on investigations of character.

This is how we are wired. In the wilds, that sort of response has great survival value. It is best to be sure about the stranger before extending a hand of welcome. If you're not careful, you may pull back a stump.

But we don't live in the wilds. Stranger hostility has lost most of its survival value in a world of billions who need to depend on each other for survival.

Another blind spot is what Daniel Kahneman refers to as the "law of small numbers." We draw irresponsibly large conclusions from painfully small samples. We believe that one or two experiences of a stranger give us enough information to draw big conclusions about all the people who resemble that stranger. We draw conclusions about all black people, about all white people, about all poor people, about all rich people, about all...well, you get the idea.

And those broad conclusions are inevitably inaccurate.  Kahneman says that our brains are more interested in coherence than in accuracy. Our brains are more interested in comfortable certainty than in realistic doubt. He notes that "sustaining doubt is harder work than sliding into certainty. The law of small numbers is a manifestation of a general bias that favors certainty over doubt..." (Thinking, Fast and Slow, page 114).

When we combine the Law of Small Numbers with our self-justification biases, we have a formula for human disaster. We draw inaccurate conclusions and then we sort our experience to support the conclusions we have drawn. It takes too much work to suspend judgment and to question our own reasoning. It's much easier and far more comfortable to believe that "those people" are bad. And once we have begun that process, we are not far from dehumanizing and destroying them.

So thank you, Shonda Rimes, and all your colleagues, for exposing us both to real people like us on the screen and real people unlike us on the screen. At least our sample size might be increased!