Beyond Bias
Neuroscience
research shows how new organizational practices can shift ingrained thinking.
A version of this article
appeared in the Autumn 2015 issue of strategy+business.
Imagine that you are hiring an employee for a position in which a
new perspective would be valuable. But while reviewing resumes, you find
yourself drawn to a candidate who is similar in age and background to your
current staff. You remind yourself that it’s important to build a cohesive
team, and offer her the job.
Or suppose that you’re planning to vote against a significant new
investment. This is the second time it’s come up, and you voted no before. A
colleague argues that conditions have changed, the project would now be highly
profitable, and you can’t afford to lose this opportunity. Upon closer
examination, you see that his data is convincing, but you vote no again.
Something about his new information just doesn’t feel relevant.
These are examples of common, everyday biases. Biases are nonconscious
drivers — cognitive quirks — that influence how people see the world. They
appear to be universal in most of humanity, perhaps hardwired into the brain as
part of our genetic or cultural heritage, and they exert their influence
outside conscious awareness. You cannot go shopping, enter a conversation, or
make a decision without your biases kicking in.
On the whole, biases are helpful and adaptive. They enable people
to make quick, efficient judgments and decisions with minimal cognitive effort.
But they can also blind a person to new information, or inhibit someone from
considering valuable options when making an important decision.
A number of biases occur so often, in so many contexts, that
cognitive scientists have given them names. (See “Common Biases,” below.) Some,
like the confirmation bias (which leads people to discount information that
disagrees with their assumptions), have been critical factors in financial
crises, including the Great Recession of 2007. This crisis also derived in part
from the temporal discounting bias: Bankers chose to pursue immediate gains,
even if that meant ignoring long-term risks. Two other common biases, the
illusion of control and the planning fallacy, adversely affected Japan’s
preparedness for the 2011 tsunami, as well as New York’s ability to recover
from Hurricane Sandy in 2012. People overestimate the degree to which they can
control the negative effects of a disaster and underestimate the time and
effort it would take to prepare for one. All of these biases, and others, lead
many great companies and institutions to make disastrous and dysfunctional
decisions.
Common Biases
Similarity
Ingroup Bias: Perceiving
people who are similar to you (in ethnicity, religion, socioeconomic status,
profession, etc.) more positively. (“We can trust her; her hometown is near
mine.”)
Outgroup Bias: Perceiving
people who are different
from you more negatively. (“We can’t trust him; look where he grew up.”)
from you more negatively. (“We can’t trust him; look where he grew up.”)
Expedience
Belief Bias: Deciding
whether an argument is strong or weak on the basis of whether you agree with
its conclusion. (“This logic can’t be right; it would lead us to make that
investment I don’t like.”)
Confirmation Bias: Seeking
and finding evidence that confirms your beliefs and ignoring evidence that does
not. (“I trust only one news channel; it tells the truth about the political
party I despise.”)
Availability Bias: Making
a decision based on the information that comes to mind most quickly, rather
than on more objective evidence. (“I’m not worried about heart disease, but I
live in fear of shark attacks because I saw one on the news.”)
Anchoring Bias: Relying
heavily on the first piece of information offered (the “anchor”) when
considering a decision. (“First they offered to sell the car for $35,000. Now
they’re asking $30,000. It must be a good deal.”)
Base Rate Fallacy: When
judging how probable something is, ignoring the base rate (the overall rate of
occurrence). (“I know that only a small percentage of startups succeed, but
ours is a sure thing.”)
Planning Fallacy: Underestimating
how long it will take to complete a task, how much it will cost, and its risks,
while overestimating its benefits. (“Trust me, we can finish this project in
just three weeks.”)
Representativeness Bias: Believing
that something that is more representative is necessarily more prevalent.
(“There may be more qualified programmers in the rest of the world, but we’re
staffing our software design group from Silicon Valley.”)
Hot Hand Fallacy: Believing
that someone who was successful in the past has a greater chance of achieving
further success. (“Bernard Madoff has had an unbroken winning streak; I’m
reinvesting.”)
Halo Effect: Letting
someone’s positive qualities in one area influence overall perception of that
individual. (“He may not know much about people, but he’s a great engineer and
a hard-working guy; let’s put him in charge of the team.”)
Experience
Blind Spot: Identifying
biases in other people but not in yourself. (“She always judges people much too
harshly.”)
False Consensus Effect: Overestimating
the universality of your own beliefs, habits, and opinions. (“Of course I hate
broccoli; doesn’t everyone?”)
Fundamental Attribution
Error: Believing that your own errors or failures are due to
external circumstances, but others’ errors are due to intrinsic factors like
character. (“I made a mistake because I was having a bad day; you made a
mistake because you’re not very smart.”)
Hindsight Bias: Seeing
past events as having been predictable in retrospect. (“I knew the financial
crisis was coming.”)
Illusion of Control: Overestimating
your influence over external events. (“If I had just left the house a minute
earlier, I wouldn’t have gotten stuck at this traffic light.”)
Illusion of Transparency: Overestimating
the degree to which your mental state is accessible to others. (“Everyone in
the room could see what I was thinking; I didn’t have to say it.”)
Egocentric Bias: Weighing
information about yourself disproportionately in making judgments and decisions
— for example, about communications strategy. (“There’s no need for a
discussion of these legal issues; I understood them easily.”)
Distance
Endowment Effect: Expecting
others to pay more for something than you would pay yourself. (“This is sure to
fetch thousands at the auction.”)
Affective Forecasting: Judging
your future emotional states based on how you feel now. (“I feel miserable
about it, and I always will.”)
Temporal Discounting: Placing
less value on rewards as they move further into the future. (“They made a great
offer, but they can’t pay me for five weeks, so I’m going with someone
else.”)
Safety
Loss Aversion: Making
a risk-averse choice if the expected outcome is positive, but making a
risk-seeking choice to avoid negative outcomes. (“We have to take a chance and
invest in this, or our competitors will beat us to it.”)
Framing Effect: Basing
a judgment on whether a decision is presented as a gain or as a loss, rather
than on objective criteria. (“I hate this idea now that I see our competitors
walking away from it.”)
Sunk Costs: Having a hard time giving up on
something (a strategy, an employee, a process) after investing time, money, or
training, even though the investment can’t be recovered. (“I’m not shutting
this project down; we’d lose everything we’ve invested in it.”)
In a hyperconnected world,
where poor decisions can multiply as if in a chain reaction, breaking free of
unhelpful bias has never been more important. That is why many large
organizations are putting money and resources toward educating people about biases.
For example, U.S. companies spend an estimated US$200 million to $300 million a year on
diversity programs and sensitivity training, in which executives, managers, and
all other employees are being told to watch out for biases, in particular when
making hiring and promotion decisions.
Unfortunately, there is very little evidence that educating people
about biases does anything to reduce their influence. Human biases occur
outside conscious awareness, and thus people are literally unaware of them as
they occur. As an individual, you cannot consciously “watch out for biases,”
because there will never be anything to see. It would be like trying to “watch
out” for how much insulin you are producing.
How then can the negative effects of bias be overcome?
Collectively. Organizations and teams can become aware of bias in ways that
individuals cannot. Team-based practices can be redesigned to help identify
biases as they emerge, and counteract them on the fly, thus mitigating their
effect.
The first step is to
identify the types of bias likely to be prevalent in organizations. To that
end, we have grouped the 150 or so known common biases into five categories,
based on their underlying cognitive nature: similarity, expedience, experience,
distance, and safety. (Our research group has named this the SEEDSTM model.)
Each category has defining features as well as mitigation strategies specific
to that bias. Once you know which type of bias you are dealing with, you can
put the strategies in place and make more effective decisions.
Similarity Biases
“People like me are better than others.”
If you are like most people, you are highly motivated to focus your
attention on anything that portrays you in the best possible light. This
motivation affects the way you perceive other people and groups. The similarity
biases are part of your brain’s natural defenses; they promote and protect
those associated with you — including your family, team, and company. But they
also perpetuate stereotypes and prejudice, even when counterproductive.
The two most prevalent forms of similarity bias are ingroup and
outgroup preferences. You hold a relatively positive perception of people who
are similar to you (the ingroup) and a relatively negative perception of those
who are different (the outgroup). Even when you are not aware of these two
biases, they are reflected in your behavior. For example, as described earlier,
you are more likely to hire ingroup members — and once you hire them, you’re
likely to give them bigger budgets, bigger raises, and more promotions.
Social neuroscience research has shown that people perceive and
relate to ingroup and outgroup members very differently. In fact, merely
assigning people to arbitrary teams creates great liking for fellow members of
the team, less liking of members of another team, and greater activity in
several brain regions involved in emotions and decision making (the amygdala,
orbitofrontal cortex, and striatum) in response to ingroup faces.
Similarity biases affect many decisions involving people,
including what clients to work with, what social networks to join, and what
contractors to hire. A purchasing manager might prefer to buy from someone who
grew up in his or her hometown, just because it “feels safer.” A board might
grant a key role to someone who most looks the part, versus someone who can do
the best job. The bias is unfortunate because research (for example, by
Katherine Phillips) has shown that teams and groups made up of people with
varying backgrounds and perspectives are likely to make consistently better
decisions and execute them more effectively.
The best way to mitigate similarity bias is to find commonalities
with those who appear different. You can’t change your bias of preference for
the ingroup, but you can bring more people into that affiliation. Pay attention
(and bring your team’s attention) to the goals, values, experiences, and preferences
that you share with the outgroup. This causes the brain to recategorize these
individuals and thus create a more level playing field. For hiring and
promotion decisions, remove potentially biasing information or features (name,
sex, ethnicity) from formal materials. Even though people are aware of
ethnicity and gender in any face-to-face encounter, the absence of formal
written reinforcing cues can help. Instead, cue similarity: Pepper the
documents with references to the ways in which different types of people
contribute, or how someone is “one of us.” Studies have found, for example,
that considering a man and woman for promotion at one time leads to fairer
treatment than considering either person alone.
Expedience Biases
“If it feels right, it must be true.”
Expedience biases can be
described as mental shortcuts that help us make quick and efficient decisions.
As Daniel Kahneman pointed out in Thinking,
Fast and Slow, the human brain has two parallel decision-making systems.
“System 1” relies on information that can be retrieved without much effort: Its
associations “feel right.” That’s what makes it expedient. When people need to
make decisions based on more objective, less accessible information, the
brain’s “System 2” has to get involved. System 2 is slower, more difficult to
engage, and less pleasurable. It can be called upon to correct System 1’s
mistakes, but it requires more cognitive effort and concentration. Most people
naturally tend to favor System
One very common form of expedience bias is the availability bias.
This is the tendency to make a decision based on the information that’s most
readily accessible in the brain (what comes to mind most quickly) instead of
taking varied perspectives into account. This bias inhibits us from looking for
and considering all potentially relevant information. It can thus block the
brain from making the most objective and adaptive decisions. The case of the
lost investment described at the beginning of this article shows the subtle,
corrosive influence of the availability bias.
Expedience biases tend to crop up in decisions that require
concentrated effort: complex calculation, analysis, evaluation, or the
formation of conclusions from data. A sales rep or consultant who automatically
reverts to a few familiar solutions, instead of really listening to client
problems, is probably suffering from an availability bias. So is a doctor who
assumes a new patient has a familiar condition, without more carefully
analyzing the diagnosis. Even these portrayals of expedience bias could
themselves be examples, since they draw conclusions without fully exploring the
details of the sales rep’s or doctor’s decision making.
Expedience biases tend to be exacerbated when people are in a
hurry or are cognitively depleted — exhausted from stress and multiple
decisions. To mitigate the bias, you have to provide incentives for people to
step off the easier cognitive path. Create incentives for them to challenge
themselves and others, perhaps by identifying their own mistakes and foster a
culture that encourages this. For instance, you might relax a deadline to allow
more time for considering alternatives, or ask a sales rep to lay out the logic
of his or her approach with a client step-by-step, encouraging both yourself
and the rep to identify flaws in the logic.
You can also mitigate expedience biases by breaking a problem into
its component parts. It may help to involve a wider group of people and get
some outside opinions as part of the typical decision-making process, as well
as implementing a mandatory “cooling off” period (10 minutes of relaxation or a
walk outdoors) before making decisions under pressure.
Experience Biases
“My perceptions are accurate.”
The human brain has evolved to regard its own perceptions as
direct and complete. In other words, people tend to assume that what they see
is all there is to see, and all of it is accurate. But this attitude overlooks
the vast array of processes within the brain that construct the experience of
reality. Your expectations, past experiences, personality, and emotional state
all color your perception of what is happening in the world.
Experience biases are particularly pernicious when they breed
misunderstandings among people who work together. If you hold a strong
conviction that you see reality as it is, then you assume that anyone who sees
things differently must either be incorrect or lying. As social neuroscientist
Matthew Lieberman has noted, when two people each think the other person is
crazy, mean, stupid, prejudiced, dishonest, or lazy, there is often an
experience bias at work.
It is very difficult to convince someone who has an experience
bias that he or she might be the one who is mistaken. These biases are similar
to visual illusions — even if you logically know that it is an illusion, your
intuitive experience of it remains powerful. You may find it easy to identify
other people’s biases, but not your own. (That’s known as the bias blind spot.)
You might also fall prey to the false consensus effect: overestimating the
extent to which others agree with you or think the same way you do. For
example, if you prefer vanilla to chocolate ice cream, you are likely to think
that most people have the same preference. People who prefer chocolate,
however, will also assume that they are in the majority. In an organizational
setting, this assumption can lead to unnecessary conflicts, especially if
leaders assume that many others agree with their preferences, and make decisions
accordingly.
Experience biases often manifest themselves when you try to
influence others or sell an idea. On a sales call, you might not realize that
other people are less excited by your product than you are. When making a
presentation, you might forget that others do not know the context. If you are
a senior leader pushing for a major organizational change, you might not see
that others don’t agree, or that they have legitimate concerns.
Experience biases respond to an organizational approach, so put
systems into place that minimize their influence. For example, you can set up
practices for routinely seeking opinions from people who are not on the team or
project. Other techniques include revisiting ideas after a break to see them in
a fresh, more objective light, or setting aside time to look at yourself and
your message through other people’s eyes.
Distance Biases
“Near is stronger than far.”
Proximity is a salient unconscious driver of decision making.
Brain scan studies have shown that one network in the brain registers all types
of proximity — conceptual proximity, such as whether or not you own an object,
as well as proximity in space and in time. The closer an object, an individual,
or an outcome is in space, time, or perceived ownership, the greater the value
assigned to it.
For example, given the choice between receiving $100 today and
$150 tomorrow, most people will (quite rationally) wait a day to get the larger
sum. But when the choice becomes $100 today versus $150 three months from now,
the majority will choose the lesser but more immediate payment — despite the
fact that there are very few other ways to earn a guaranteed 50 percent return
on investment in three months. Thanks to a distance bias called temporal
discounting, the further away in time the $150 is, the more its value
decreases. Psychologically, $100 is worth more than $150 when time is a factor.
Distance bias often manifests as a tendency toward short-term
thinking instead of long-term investment. It can also lead you to neglect people
or projects that aren’t in your own backyard — a particular problem for global
organizations whose managers must oversee and develop business and human
capital at great distances.
To mitigate this kind of
bias, take distance out of the equation. Evaluate the outcome or object as if
it were closer to you in space, time, or ownership. This orients you to
recognize its full value. Of course, you will still consider time and physical
distance as factors when making decisions. For example, as business strategy
writer Pankaj Ghemawat has pointed out, the
geographic and cultural distance of another country should affect any plans you
have to expand your business there. But those elements should factor into the
decision consciously, without the unconscious influence of a bias that might
lead to an inferior conclusion.
Safety Biases
“Bad is stronger than good.”
The fact that negative information tends to be more salient and
motivating than positive information is evolutionarily adaptive. A
hunter–gatherer whose brain responds quickly to the threat of a snake would be
more likely to survive than one whose brain responds first to the charm of its
colorful markings. That’s why, for most people, losing $20 feels worse than
finding $20 feels good.
This principle manifests itself in safety biases like loss
aversion. When considering a transaction or investment, regardless of the
merits of the deal, you are likely to be attracted if you perceive it as a way
to avoid a loss rather than as a potential opportunity to gain. You may think
of yourself as strongly oriented toward winning, but your actions are likely
more influenced by the need to avoid losing, a very different concern.
Another safety bias is the framing effect, first identified by
Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman in 1981. When an opportunity is framed as a
gain, people tend to be relatively conscious of the risk involved. But if the
risk is framed as a way to avoid a loss, then people are more likely to ignore
or justify it. This is true even though the objective information is the same
in both cases.
Safety biases can influence any decision about the probability of
risk or return, or the allocation of resources including money, time, and
people. These biases affect financial decisions, investment decisions, resource
allocation, strategy development, or planning for strategy execution. Examples
include not being able to let go of a business unit because of resources
already invested in the project and not being willing to innovate in a new
direction because it would compete with the company’s existing business.
To mitigate safety bias, you can conduct conversations that add
psychological distance to the decision. Imagine that you are giving advice to
someone in your shoes rather than making the decision for your own enterprise.
When making decisions for others, you can be less biased because the threat
network is not as strongly activated. Or imagine that the decision has been
already been made, and you are seeing it from a later point in time. Studies
suggest that recasting events this way, from a more objective, distanced
perspective, makes those events less emotional and less tied to the self.
Managing for Bias
All of the mitigation strategies described in this article engage
the brain’s ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, which acts, in this case, like a
braking system helping you exercise cognitive control and broaden your
attention beyond your own, self-specific viewpoint. As you identify and mitigate
biases in your organization, keep four general principles in mind:
• Bias is universal. There is a general human predisposition to
make fast and efficient judgments, and you are just as susceptible to this as
anyone else. If you believe you are less biased than other people, that’s
probably a sign that you are more biased than you realize.
• It is difficult to manage for bias in the moment you’re making a
decision. You need to design practices and processes in advance. Consciously
identify situations in which more deliberative thought and strategies would be
helpful, and then set up the necessary conversations and other mechanisms for
mitigating bias.
• In designing bias-countering processes and practices, encourage
those that place a premium on cognitive effort over intuition or gut instinct.
• Individual cognitive effort is not enough. You have to cultivate
an organization-wide culture in which people continually remind one another
that the brain’s default setting is egocentric, that they will sometimes get
stuck in a belief that their experience and perception of reality is the only
objective truth, and that better decisions will come from stepping back to seek
out a wider variety of perspectives and views.
Although more research and development needs to be done on both
the theory and practice of breaking bias, we believe that this approach can
provide a useful step forward. By reducing the unhelpful biases that are at the
heart of many organizational challenges today, not only do you reduce the risk
of catastrophic loss — you redefine what it means for an organization to win.
http://www.strategy-business.com/article/00345?gko=d11ee&utm_source=itw&utm_medium=20160630&utm_campaign=resp
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