What a Blind Celebrity Wine Tasting Taught Me About Personal Bias

We often hold preconceived notions that unfairly govern our thoughts — how do we move past them?

Let me tell you when I sat down to do a blind celebrity wine tasting with my family, I did not think one of the takeaways would be a life lesson. No, I’m not kidding. That being said, I suppose there’s something to reflect on in everything we do.

For background, my family selected 5 celebrity produced wines that we were going to taste blind, and then rate from least to most favorite. The actual tasting was extremely fun and pretending to be wine aficionados was very entertaining.

However, unlike my family, I also wrote which celebrity I thought produced which wine next to my rating. At the end of the tasting, a fascinating pattern had emerged. Besides the fact that my guesses were way off, I subconsciously associated my least favorite celebrities with my least favorite wines.

I was taken aback because it’s not as if I hated the celebrities at the bottom of my ratings, I just preferred the others. For perspective, I rated a country singers wine as my least favorite; country music just happens to be my least favorite genre. Sorry country fans.

In fact, the rest of my ratings fell in similar ways. I thought I was being completely unbiased and going by taste, but in reality, my ratings were subconsciously affected by preconceived notions I held.

This caused me to reflect and research on just how personal bias can affect our decision making even when we don’t realize it. Just how many of our independent choices are really independent?

The research ended up yielding some fascinating results.

At the end of the day, cognitive biases will heavily influence decision making if we are not careful. Anything from our own experiences to other people’s experiences can affect how we view a situation. Along with this, there are 4 main cognitive biases that affect the average person:

1. Confirmation Bias

This form of bias is when a person performing research or engaging in a discussion only looks for facts that support their own argument. In essence, we subconsciously try to validate our own beliefs without looking at others.

2. Anchoring Bias

Anchoring bias occurs when we allow a single experience or piece of information to dominate our mind when anything related to it comes up. Future decisions are all based upon a singular idea. For example, I stopped eating cheese for years because of one bad McDonald’s hamburger when I was younger. Weird, right?

3. Halo Effect

Under this bias, your interpretation of one aspect of a brand or person rules how you feel about them overall. If you don’t like how they handled an assignment you gave them, for example, you may be less inclined to invite them to things or even may begin to dislike the person.

4. Overconfidence Bias

Put simply, you are aware of and trust in your beliefs so much that you cannot be convinced you are wrong.

In my wine tasting experience, I realized I was allowing a mix between the anchoring bias and halo effect to alter my judgment. I am not a fan of country music and I allowed that distaste to influence my perspective on what I believed the country singers wine would taste like; believing it would be the worst. Our subjective bias can often influence us when we are supposed to act in an impartial manner.

That being said, how can we go about separating our biases, and improving our decision making, when most of the time they influence us subconsciously?

In truth, one of the best ways to overcome cognitive bias is to recognize its existence. It’s about knowing yourself and your likes or dislikes. We trust our intuition every single day and it is usually correct. However, it’s important to recognize that sometimes it can be misleading.

Allowing for uncertainty in your life is one of the best ways to set up your mind against biases. If you acknowledge that everything is a new experience, you are less likely to be influenced by prior thoughts.

Harvard Business Review recommends utilizing premortems to overcome certain biases as well. As defined in the article:

“This technique, also called prospective hindsight, helps you identify potential problems that ordinary foresight won’t bring to mind.”

Contrary to a postmortem, in which you examine a situation and what caused its failure, a premortem is about identifying what may cause a future failure. Personal bias affects our decision making all the time, but it affects off-the-cuff decisions most.

Forcing ourselves to stop and think longer about a situation allows us to stop subconscious thoughts that may have occurred if we responded immediately.

Honestly, it’s all about self-awareness. No one knows you better than yourself. Cognitive bias isn’t necessarily a bad thing on a day to day basis, but it’s incredibly important for us to separate our own bias from decision making on the things that really matter.

At the end of the day, a blind wine tasting isn’t a bad place for cognitive bias to come in. However, it proved to me just how influential previous personal thoughts can be.

In the future, remember that you have a lifetime of experiences and that some of those may be influencing your thinking; even if they seem unrelated.

Treat every situation as a standalone experience and learn to understand your own personal bias. Do this and you are bound to become a far better decision-maker in your daily life.