Last month, a Scientific American article drew attention to a phenomenon called the “naturalness bias.”
This bias refers to the widespread preference for individuals who seem to have a natural knack for their activity, as opposed to strivers whose achievement is seen as the product of hard work.
As tired a topic as this may be, the recent study shows the pervasiveness of this bias across disciplines, meaning very few areas of human endeavor are free from it.
Most of us have encountered this type of bias to one degree or another, whether or not we recognized it at the time.
Additionally, it’s very common to hold this bias while explicitly saying naturalness has no effect on the merit of an individual’s work.
In this way it’s a very difficult issue to pinpoint at times, because even if a person feels they are above making judgments based on perceived naturalness, there’s a decent chance they’re fooling themselves.
What’s more, there’s a better than decent chance a trade-off will be made in order to recruit a natural rather than a striver for any given activity.
“Participants were willing to make a substantial tradeoff in objective achievement, and they were more willing to select the natural even if it results in costs to themselves through the hiring of a less-qualified individual,” according to the study
So not only is the bias ubiquitous and difficult to recognize, it’s potentially very damaging to the people who hold it.
Granted, this is only true when the naturally talented individual really is objectively less high-performing.
Perhaps in anticipation of this particular objection, the article points out a natural is actually less likely to be high-achieving than a persistent striver.
Given this information, we can infer this bias is more likely to harm us than help us.
So far all of this can probably be intuitively fleshed out by the casual observer.
We have a tendency to see potential in people who display natural talent as compared to people who simply apply themselves, so the findings at least make a little sense.
But what I wanted to know immediately upon reading this article was why I had never formally heard of this bias.
Even for those of us who recognize something like the naturalness bias in ourselves and others probably don’t think of it as a pervasive force in human decision-making.
And yet here it is.
While there isn’t a whole lot anyone can do about seemingly intrinsic facets of human nature like this, simply being aware of the naturalness bias makes us more likely to recognize it in ourselves.
Given its ubiquity and robustness, coupled with the fact that it hasn’t really surfaced in the public eye, the naturalness bias has great potential for insidiousness in the realm of social judgment.
But recognition of its influence on our decision making would make it much less likely to push us toward potentially errant decision-making.
jcworrel@indiana.edu
