Folks, the boss is on vacation so the Bistro’s closed this Monday. We’ll reopen soon with a new summer menu that will make you forget everything you ever thought you knew about rhubarb. Huzzah until then.

How biased are you? What about your friends? One of these questions is simpler to answer than the other.

It’s easier to triangulate our friends’ judgments than our own. Imagine, for instance, sitting between two friends who are rooting for opposite teams in a game you’re not personally invested in. And let’s say that they are both emotionally invested enough in the outcome that they’re at least tempted to view each call in favor of their team as fair but each call against their team as a travesty. You’re in a tough position as a friend of both people but in a great position to test which of these people is more objective. You get to evaluate each call by the officials, and to hear both sides’ responses to those calls, without being swayed by your own elation or devastation as a fan. If you put your mind to it, you can probably give a fair judgment about which of these two friends is best able to set aside what she wants to be true and see accurately what actually is true. (Please be warned that usually isn’t a service that people want from their friends unless they’ve asked for it. And sometimes not even then.)

It’s much tougher, of course, to triangulate your own judgments like this. You can try, but you have to put yourself in two positions at once: you have to be both the interested fan and the disinterested observer of the fan. Most of us don’t do this naturally but there are some tricks that can help, as one of my favorite stories shows. Early in his career an Israeli psychology professor was put in charge of a special project. He headed an interdisciplinary committee tasked with running a major conference and then publishing the conference papers as a book . As it happens, the theme for this conference was objectivity.

At the committee’s third meeting the psychology professor said, “Let’s use some of these objectivity developing techniques we’ll be talking about at the conference on ourselves. First, let’s check out our subjective intuitions. How long do we think that this whole project is going to take from start to finish?” They went around the room giving their best guesses. Their answers ranged from twelve months to two and a half years, with eighteen months as the median answer.

Then the professor said, “Now let’s ground our judgments more objectively. Dean, you’ve worked with two of these projects already, correct?”

The dean said he had.

“From what you’ve seen so far, would you say our group is performing better, worse, or on par with those other two groups?”

The dean answered, “Probably a bit worse, actually. We’re going a little slower.”

Then the professor asked, “And how long did those two earlier projects take from start to finish?”

The dean blanched. “They both took eight years.” He had had this evidence at his disposal when he gave his more subjective answer earlier, yet then he had said he thought the current project would only require two years.

It took nine.

So it is possible to get a more objective view of the biases that skew our own judgments. But there’s another challenge, which the article “Objectivity in the Eye of the Beholder” reveals. We all feel like we try to check how biased or objectivity we and our friends are. And when we see one of our friends being a typical unreasonable fan – the kind who sincerely believes that the referees are trying to make her team lose – we’re generally comfortable chalking their behavior up to their biases. But what about when we see our own biases, as the dean did? Are we as willing simply to say, “Well, I guess I’m biased”?

Not at all. And in a sense, there’s a good reason for this. After all, when I do recognize my own bias, I don’t usually just throw up my hands. I either try to make the appropriate adjustments or else convince myself that I didn’t really make a mistake in the first place. But note that both of these responses are ways of preserving my sense that my judgments are consistent with reality. In the one case I commit myself to making better judgments, whereas in the other I decide that reality really is in accord with the way I see it. Each is preferable to accepting that I’m just consistently off. That would be like beginning most sentences with, “I know this is wrong, but -” That sort of nonchalance is just terribly difficult to maintain.

Unfortunately, this makes us much more likely to recognize other people’s biases than our own. Since I thought this was an interesting finding I started sharing it at conferences. I found that people agreed wholeheartedly. I had never before seen whole rooms shake their heads so enthusiastically. Finally I realized this might be additional evidence for the same point, so I added a question as a test. The next time I presented the conclusion, “People have no trouble recognizing others’ biases but tend not to see their own,” and once again everyone nodded yes. So I asked, “Are you nodding because you think this is true about other people, or because it’s true about you too?” This time I received silence. Then about half the room laughed and the other half frowned.

So here’s the challenge: Can you sustain this contradiction, Whitman-style, and accept that your biggest bias might be that you cannot see your own biases? Or is this one of those Philosophical puzzles that is fun to play with but that we have to let go when it’s time to get on with our lives? (The classic example, of course, is Zeno’s paradox, which demonstrated convincingly that’s it’s impossible to ever get from point A to point B. At some point Zeno probably told a friend he was coming over that evening to share his great new paradox. I’m hoping the friend listened attentively and then asked, “Then what are you doing here?”)

I’ve been thinking lately about the reality of stories. I don’t have much penchant for doing science myself, but I respect its ability to uncover truth enough to consider the scientifically revealed universe as fundamental reality. That is to say, as much as I struggle to understand how atoms work, much less quarks, I believe that reality necessarily consists in the interactions of such particles. By contrast, I am significantly more invested in stories – hearing them, creating them, passing them on – even though I am much less certain about the extent to which I should consider them real. Now, you may say, “What difference does that make?” – but this is a Philosophy bistro, after all, and that’s really kind of a sour attitude you’re taking. Now here: have a refreshing cup of lime and mint-infused ice water as I get your appetizer order in. You’re welcome.

My stepdaughters know I’m full of it. We’ve lived in the same house together for a little over a year, and they’ve gotten in the habit of responding to almost anything I say by asking, “Really?” I always immediately confess if I’ve made up the thing I just said, and try to keep to something close to a 50% truth ratio going. It’s particularly fun when I’ve found some fact that seems so absurd that it must be fiction, so that I get to swear “Yes” over and over to each repeated “Really?” At the same time, it’s as important to me as it is to their mother that we be truthful with each other when we need to. Lying about, say, whether you threw a toy at your sister is never okay. What’s more, the girls seem to have some predilection toward science, and especially because I know how easy it is for girls and women to get pushed out of those fields, I’m doing my best to encourage empirical observation and other basic science skill sets to help them stay on that track if they choose to. Yet I smile most when they tell stories too – when they engage in some ridiculous word play or spontaneously come up with an absurd explanation. As long as we still keep track of what the truth is for when we need it, I value that kind of play more than I value the truth.

So maybe it just doesn’t matter whether stories are real or not. Except that, as a matter of fact, I think they are. That reality isn’t, of course, the same as that enjoyed by atoms and quarks. But stories are an aspect of our shared environment. Saturday Night Live’s Jack Handy once quipped, “I bet one legend that keeps recurring throughout history, in every culture, is the story of Popeye,” which is funny because that’s actually pretty hard to imagine. Popeye doesn’t seem a likely candidate for a cultural universal. But he is widely known to Americans, so much so that your audience is likely to understand many references to him instantly. I’m somewhat embarrassed to admit that nearly every time I throw a little olive oil in the pan I hear his scraggly voice singing, “Oh Olive Oyl.” (As voices in your head go, this isn’t a bad one.) But even if most people wouldn’t remember that, they would know that spinach instantly makes you extremely strong and prone to getting into fistfights with your enormous forearms. This isn’t a tremendously rich store to draw on. At most it might liven up, say, your encouraging your daughter to eat her spinach, or to not get in fistfights, or to eschew ethnic profiling. (What ethnicity was Popeye, anyway? And has anyone ever actually talked like that?)

Other stories are much richer, though. Sacred texts like the Torah, the New Testament, and the Quran have been passed down perhaps most of all through individual stories like the parable of the good Samaritan, which people repeat in order to make sense of their own and others’ actions. (The Coen Brothers’ A Serious Man has fun with this by presenting a series of inscrutable parables, including “The Goy’s Teeth,” that it resolutely refuses to explicate for the audience.) Harriett Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin provided such a condemnatory picture of slavery that pro-slavery authors fought back with competing novels with titles like Uncle Robin, in His Cabin in Virginia, and Tom Without One in Boston. But Stowe’s narrative largely won out and her account of Eliza’s escape with her son over the icy Ohio River provided common inspiration for abolitionists all over the North in the decade leading up to the Civil War. Generations later, many African-Americans would so object to aspects of Stowe’s characterization of slaves that “Uncle Tom” would become a denigrating epithet for a black man taken to act submissively toward whites.

All of these examples indicate some of the many ways that stories provide a shared means of interpreting our experiences, without which we would struggle much more to understand each other. Maybe if stories can have that much effect, it doesn’t matter whether we consider them “real” or not. “Made up” is a kind of real too.