Cognitive Biases Are Bad for Business
Do you see irrationality in your company?
The conventional wisdom in classical economics is that we humans are “rational actors” who, by our nature, make decisions and behave in ways that maximize advantage and utility and minimize risk and costs. This theory has driven economic policy for generations despite daily anecdotal evidence that we are anything but rational, for example, how we invest and what we buy. Economists who embrace this assumption seem to live by the maxim, “If the facts don’t fit the theory, throw out the facts,” attributed, ironically enough, to Albert Einstein.
But any notion that we are, in fact, rational actors, was blown out of the water by Dr. Daniel Kahneman , the winner of the 2002 Nobel Prize for economics, and his late colleague Amos Tversky. Their groundbreaking, if not rather intuitive, findings on cognitive biases , have demonstrated quite unequivocally that humans make decisions and act in ways that are anything but rational.
Cognitive biases can be characterized as the tendency to make decisions and take action based on limited acquisition and/or processing of information or on self-interest, overconfidence, or attachment to past experience.
Cognitive biases can result in perceptual blindness or distortion (seeing things that aren’t really there), illogical interpretation (being nonsensical), inaccurate judgments (being just plain wrong), irrationality (being out of touch with reality), and bad decisions (being dumb). The outcomes of decisions that are influenced by cognitive biases can range from the mundane to the lasting to the catastrophic, for example, buying an unflattering outfit, getting married to the wrong person, and going to war, respectively.
Cognitive biases can be broadly placed in two categories. Information biases include the use of heuristics , or information-processing shortcuts, that produce fast and efficient, though not necessarily accurate, decisions and not paying attention nor adequately thinking through relevant information.
Ego biases include emotional motivations, such as fear , anger , or worry, and social influences such as peer pressure , the desire for acceptance, and doubt that other people can be wrong.
When cognitive biases influence individuals, real problems can arise. But when cognitive biases impact a business, then the problems can be exponentially worse. Just think of the Edsel and the Microsoft Kin . Clearly, cognitive biases are bad for business. Cognitive biases are most problematic because they cause business people to make bad decisions.
In my corporate consulting work, where I help companies make good decisions, I have identified 12 cognitive biases that appear to be most harmful to decision making in the business world. Some of these cognitive biases were developed and empirically validated by Kahneman and Tversky. Others I identified and subsequently passed the “duck” test (if it looks like a duck and sounds like a duck, it’s probably a duck).
Information biases include:
Think about the bad decisions that you and your company has made over the years, both minor and catastrophic, and you will probably see the fingerprints of some of these cognitive biases all over the dead bodies.
The good news is that there are four steps you can take to mitigate cognitive biases in your individual decision making and in the decisions that are made in your company.
Daniel Kahneman recommends that you ask three questions to minimize the impact of cognitive biases in your decision making:
In answering each of these questions, you must look closely at how each may be woven into the recommendation that has been offered and separate them from its value. If a recommendation doesn’t stand up to scrutiny on its own merits, free of cognitive bias, it should be discarded.
Only by filtering out the cognitive biases that are sure to arise while decisions are being made can you be confident that, at the end of the day, the best decision for you and your company was made based on the best available information.
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Jim Taylor, Ph.D. , teaches at the University of San Francisco.
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This article is part of the Bringwise Psychology Journal — daily insights on human behavior, mental health, and personal growth.