Creator’s bias 🎨

Definition

Due to the lengthy process of creation, creators may not be able to fully comprehend how or what their creations are communicating.

This happens because of

A) The creator begins with an intention, but the process of transferring that intention onto the content is often inefficient. My-side bias and adjacent dynamics create the illusion that this transfer is more successful than it actually is.

When subjects were asked to finger-tap a popular tune of their choosing they were hugely overconfident how many people would get it. They estimated that 50% of people would get it whereas in reality 1.33% got it. from 1990 Stanford experiment

See Tapping experiment

B) The universal, largely physiological process that gradually makes you not see things you look at. When you eat, listen, or smell, the first impressions are the strongest. The longer you are in a situation, the less you are able to see how it exists in the world.

Bias correction

The key question is how to create a situation where you become an unbiased audience for your own work, viewing it with fresh eyes.

(Below is a list of ideas on how to think and counter this issue. While these may not be universal solutions, they could help in certain situations when used well)

When one becomes biased when viewing own work:
- You've worked on any fragment of it for too long.
- You’ve sweated about the details of it for too long.
- Your identity or status markers is to tightly bound with the ideas or assumed quality of it.
How to counter-act this mechanism:
- You may need to keep pace at creating/writing. There needs of moving forward and sweating the details of each independent cognitive unit. This doesn't mean you can't write detailed descriptions. However, it suggests that when writing an overview, you should spend roughly the same amount of time on each pass as you would on a sentence about a more specific aspect of the idea.
- Breaks from work are important. After an immersive work try to intentionally not look at the piece. Allow your mind to forget your original intentions. This helps you connect with how the work truly "reads" to an external audience.
- When working on a piece, pay attention to the initial impressions and connotations that arise from rereading its contents (my mind is skilled at disconnecting from these impressions). However, if I consciously focus on them, I engage more with the actual content and what it truly communicates, rather than my rationalizations or imaginary ideas about its message. This approach also helps me better imagine how an external person, unfamiliar with the idea, might interpret it.
- Conduct User research by gathering feedback from other people (ideally those unaffiliated with you). Understanding user research and obtaining quality feedback is complex. For the best guidance, I recommend the chapters by Michael Margolis in the Design Sprint book.