“Leaders need to correct for cognitive biases the way a sharpshooter corrects for wind velocity or a yachtsman corrects for the tide.”
―Paul Gibbons, The Science of Successful Organizational Change: How Leaders Set Strategy, Change Behavior, and Create an Agile Culture
Everyone has biases. They are the brain’s way to help speed up the decision-making process. Taking shortcuts, however, isn’t always for the best. Although it gets one to the point quicker, cognitive biases can hinder the ability to think accurately. This can influence hiring, training, promotion, and termination practices.
According to The Atlantic, the idea of cognitive biases was first brought up in the 1970s by two social scientists, Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman.
Common Thinking Errors That Might Affect How You Make Decisions
Survivorship bias is the tendency to focus on past successes while ignoring past failures when making a decision.
The most popular example of this bias comes from the deduction made by Abraham Wald, a statistician working for the US military during World War II. When the military started deciding how to armor their planes, he pointed out that they shouldn’t look at the planes and go back to note the areas where they got shot heavily and increase the armor in said places; instead, they should focus on the parts of the planes that are least ridden with bullets. The reason being that the surviving planes showed where the planes could suffer damage and survive. If the bullet went somewhere else, they couldn’t survive. As a result, those are the areas that needed further protection.
This may affect Human Resources when it comes to recruiting by influencing the way resumes get reviewed. The tendency to gloss over failures and focus on successes based on superficial signals instead of considering the entire context that resulted in an individual’s high performance can lead to an inefficient team.
One way to overcome survivorship bias is by being aware of this bias, taking into consideration screening applicants more closely, and verifying as much of their performance as possible.
Confirmation bias, defined as seeking confirmation for pre-existing beliefs and ignoring information that disproves them, can also decrease organizations’ chances of hiring good candidates by reducing the quality of the decision-making process.
In an article, Harvard Business School points out that confirmation bias can be overcome by using these three main tactics:
- asking neutral questions
- playing the devil’s advocate
- rethinking the hiring process
Anchoring bias is a cognitive bias where an individual depends too heavily on an initial piece of information offered (the “anchor”) to make later judgments during decision-making.
Zapier suggests that a way to overcome the anchoring effect in your business is by using a report or chart app to generate reports. Experimenting with different data visualization concepts, they point out, might have you notice new, different, and more powerful patterns.
Retrospective thinking and analysis is another way of noticing errors in our thinking and avoiding making the same mistakes. Daniel Kahneman suggests using a decision journal. As Kahneman said:
“Go down to a local drugstore and buy a very cheap notebook and start keeping track of your decisions. And the specific idea is whenever you’re making a consequential decision, something going in or out of the portfolio, just take a moment to think, write down what you expect to happen, why you expect it to happen and then actually, and this is optional, but probably a great idea, is write down how you feel about the situation, both physically and even emotionally. Just, how do you feel? I feel tired. I feel good, or this stock is really draining me. Whatever you think.
The key to doing this is that it prevents something called hindsight bias, which is no matter what happens in the world, we tend to look back on our decision-making process, and we tilt it in a way that looks more favorable to us, right? So we have a bias to explain what has happened.”
Although cognitive biases can lead us down the wrong path, no problem is without a solution. Simply being aware of cognitive biases might not be enough to overcome them, but the more you learn about them, the less likely they are to affect your workplace environment.
