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What Expectation Bias Costs Us in Human Services
A Side of Hope with Melanie Bazile
In this episode, Melanie Bazile explores expectation bias, the tendency to perceive, interpret, and remember information in ways that confirm what we already expect to be true. Drawing on more than 30 years in human services, she unpacks how this shows up not just in daily life, but in the field itself, in referrals, diagnoses, and the labels attached to the people we serve.
Melanie opens with her own story: a craving for Chipotle chips led her to drive past the restaurant three times because it didn’t match the storefront she expected to see. It’s a small moment, but it sets up the bigger idea. We don’t always see what’s actually there. We see what we’ve already decided is there.
From there, she brings in a striking piece of research: a study in which participants were shown a fake scar on their face, sent out to have conversations with strangers, and reported feeling judged and treated differently, even after the scar had been secretly removed before they left the room. The expectation shaped the experience, whether or not the reality matched it.
The episode’s turning point is personal. Melanie shares the story of Tim, a young man she almost declined to serve based on a referral packet that painted him as someone she “couldn’t possibly” work with. The person she actually met didn’t match the file at all, and the disconnect became a lasting lesson in how labels can replace the person in front of us before we’ve even met them.
She also names how expectation bias shows up in judgments about what’s possible for the people human services professionals support, low expectations that limit opportunity, and unrealistically high ones that create their own kind of pressure. Both distort what she calls the real goal: accurate expectations, held with openness to what might still be possible.
Melanie closes with four practical shifts pulled from person centered thinking: stay curious, actively look for evidence that contradicts your assumption, listen, and separate what you observed from the meaning you attached to it.
In this episode:
- Why our brains are wired to notice what confirms existing beliefs
- The scar study and what it reveals about expectation versus reality
- How referral packets and diagnostic labels can replace the person we’re meeting
- The story of Tim, and what changed when Melanie stayed curious
- Four person centered thinking tools to challenge expectation bias in practice
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