Approximately 730 words (2-4 minute read)
Of course not, we just prefer people success comes to easily.
Coach and leadership consultant Jeff Haden poses the following thought puzzle:
You’re looking to fill a coding job and have short listed two equally qualified candidates:
One is a natural, “it’s almost like she was born to code.”
The other is a grinder, “she’s worked long and hard to develop her skills.”
Even if you value motivation, hard work and perseverance, Haden points to researchi suggesting that there’s a good chance you’ll hire the first, “prodigy”-like candidate.
A bias in favor of “naturals” appears to work across a wide variety of fields, including music and business -- in both cases, observers who rated pairs of musical pieces or elevator pitches consistently preferred the one they were told was by a “natural” -- even though the music and the presentations were exactly the same.
This is the “naturalness bias” at work. In the words of Angela Duckworth, author of the best selling book “Grit”:
“The ‘naturalness bias’ is a hidden prejudice against those who’ve achieved what they have because they worked for it, and a hidden preference for those whom we think arrived at their place in life because they’re naturally talented. We may not admit to others this bias for naturals; we may not even admit it to ourselves. But the bias is evident in the choices we make.”
Haden points out that this is, of course, foolish. There is no guarantee that a “grind-style” worker will plateau or burn out or fail any quicker or differently than someone who is seen as being gifted. The preference exists entirely in our heads.
In some respects, the bias is particularly unfortunate. Those who have had to work hard for every increment of progress of necessity are probably better examples of what Carol Dweck called “growth mindset.” This is the idea that a person’s capacities and talents can be improved over time rather than issued at birth in a fixed quantity.
As Haden notes:
“In simple terms...If things haven’t come easily, when the going gets tough my experience tells me that eventual achievement has nothing to do with who ‘I am’ but with who I work hard to become.”
The solution to this problem isn’t simply to only hire strivers and reject people whose talents seem unearned as likely to fall apart when the going gets tough--there’s no reason to think that’ll happen either.
Rather, it’s to be sure before you hire that you understand the actual rather than just perceived qualities, attributes, skills, experiences and other requirements that you need--and hire against those.
Haden has a point, and it goes beyond the hiring process into promotions, selecting people for rewards or opportunities, even (I would think) potentially dating or marriage. Any time we are selecting someone for something where a particular attribute is valuable, this bias may come up.
Interestingly, this appears to be an outgrowth of a wider fallacy, the Appeal to Nature. The Logical Fallacies website offers this definition:
“The fallacy of appeal to nature refers to the argument that just because something is natural that is therefore valid, justified, or inevitable.”
The often unspoken corollary to this is that something “unnatural” or “artificial” must be in some way fake, specious or dangerous.
This goes to the general difficulty thinking objectively poses. The preferences for “naturals” is a heuristic which exists to help us winnow out confusing information and make quicker decisions. That’s not bad in itself, but if we let it operate unquestioned it can lead us to leave serious money on the table.
Why though? I wonder if we may want to defer to what seems like the most natural talent because it seems like a safer choice. After all, we all know things we’re naturally good at and the confidence that comes with that. It may be easy to assume that someone who projects this natural skill at something is thus a good risk.
This doesn’t follow in real life, of course. We’re all fallible to some extent, whether or talents are gifts or the fruit of painful development.
The way out of this conundrum brings us back to Haden’s suggestion. By explicitly looking at our assumptions about what we want or need, and what others really bring to the table we set ourselves up to make better decisions, both at work and in life.
i Chia-Jung Tsay, Privileging Naturals Over Strivers: The Costs of the Naturalness Bias. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Jan 2016; 42(1):40-53. DOI: 10.1177/0146167215611638.