We all love to be right. If you are a successful leader or person, then chances are you ARE right a lot. This creates the conditions for us to fall into the trap of the second decision-making villain that was identified in the book Decisive (2014).
That first decision-making villain is “narrow-framing” issues, the second is “confirmation bias”. Confirmation bias is the tendency to interpret new evidence as confirmation of one’s existing beliefs or theories.
For example, imagine that a person holds a belief that left-handed people are more creative than right-handed people. Whenever this person encounters a person that is both left-handed and creative, they place greater importance on this “evidence” that supports what they already believe. This individual might even seek “proof” that further backs up this belief while discounting examples that don’t support the idea.
Confirmation biases impact how we gather information, but also influences how we interpret and recall information. For example, people who support or oppose a particular issue will not only seek information to support it, they will also interpret news stories in a way that upholds their existing ideas. They will also remember details in a way that reinforces these attitudes.
Researchers have discovered that we are more than twice as likely to favour confirming information than disconfirming information, especially in emotion-laden areas such as politics, religion and relationships. Where we have invested a lot of time in something it also meant we are more likely to believe confirming information and discount disconfirming information.
An added problem is our tendency to jump to conclusions – that is, to base your final decision on information gained early on in the decision-making process. Think of this as a “first impression” bias. Once you form an initial picture of a situation, it’s hard to see other possibilities.
The reason why we find it hard to change our minds is that it’s easier to accept whatever we hear. To reject what we hear requires an extra step of thinking, and thinking is hard work! So, we typically follow the line of least resistance and that means our decision-making is easily biased.
We need to fight a number of blind spots:
1. Our confidence in our abilities to make good judgements and make things work. Confirmation bias creates in us a tendency to believe that we are different, better, more talented. That means we think we can beat the odds, or pick talent in interviews reliably, or make a profit when others didn’t. We often attribute something that went well with our abilities, character or charm.
2. If we have a preference for a particular outcome, we need to be aware that we will reliably focus our spotlight on favourable data.
How to Fight Confirmation Bias?
Reality test your assumptions
We do that through four ways:
1. Design a Devil’s Advocate
One of the things we need do in order to fight confirmation bias is create ways for contrary views or criticisms of potential decisions to be aired. Seeing criticism or disagreement as a noble function is vital to encourage its existence.
Many an executive has made a decision that failed only to learn later that there were many who disagreed with it but didn’t speak up. Equally there are many executives who heard opinions opposite to their own, only to dismiss it as ‘negativity’.
It might be as easy as asking one or two people in the leadership to poke holes in your preferred option and really listen.
A really helpful question to ask when there are multiple options and people are starting to take ‘positions’ is: What would need to be true for this option to be the right answer? It can move adversaries into collaborators.
2. Ask the questions of yourself and others
Sometimes we want to be sold on something. We like the person we interviewed; we want dessert, or the new clothes.
Asking questions that probes for more information might save a lot of regret. Sometimes those questions need to be specific and sometimes open. The best way to work which one will be most helpful is: “What’s the most likely way I could fail to get the right information in this situation?”
3. Expand what you notice
One of the dilemmas we face when we have to make decisions is that we have personal knowledge and preferences that colour our process. Our individual view can become our reality, but is often really misleading.
For instance, think of John who is looking to start a not-for-profit sponsoring kids in Asia. The individual view is: John has experience working at World-Vision, is passionate about the topic, has travelled to Asia many times and is a trained social worker.
Taking an expanded view, one that takes in lots of people’s experiences of setting up a not-for-profit in Asia, could be instructional. Zooming out from the individual view is about creating a broader perspective, an ‘average’ of those in similar situations. To work out averages and trends, talking to experts is really helpful. They can’t help you predict the future but they can give you the average zoomed out picture of an industry.
John would be looking for the success rate of people setting up not-for-profits in the last 10 years that are still operating. The statistics of sponsorship programs – are they going up or down etc. For instance, if John learns that 60% of not-for-profits close within the first 5 years of opening, is he prepared for that to be his organisation?
Zooming out and getting averages challenges the hubris that says, “But I am different”.
It is helpful to ask, “Am I prepared to be one of the statistics? What can I reasonably expect to happen if I make this choice?”
4. Create small experiments
When I was facing the decision of whether to leave full-time employment and become a leadership consultant I asked lots of people for their advice.
Conventional wisdom from many was, “You have to fully commit and focus or it will fail”. However I decided to create a couple of small experiments to see if the type of business I was thinking of was going to be financially sustainable and I’d be good at it.
I did a course, committing only to the lowest level, and decided I would only go to the next level if/when I earned my course fees back.
Running experiments to test our ideas, rather than running headlong into something can be really helpful when the future is hard to predict. It is hard to predict the future when we haven’t done it before.
Having said that, there came a time when I did have to commit and experiments were no longer helpful.
The decision-making villain we have discussed can be summed up as: “I’m right, because all of the information I gathered was unconsciously skewed by me to confirm what I already knew or wanted”.
You can use the four methods to help you test your reality and assumptions.
Next blog post we will look at villain #3 – Emotions.