Thursday, January 27, 2005

More brain-blinders to watch for

While digging around the web to write my recent entry on the Peak/End Rule, I stumbled on a fabulous list of other cognitive biases that any thoughtful manager should be watching for in him/herself or his/her staff.

A 'cognitive bias' is a kind of blind-spot in our brains -- the result of short-cuts or habits within our thinking process -- that can lead us to make less productive choices. This list contains a long sequence of suggested biases, some of which have been shown repeatedly in clinical testing, others that are just theoretical. Many are obviously at work in the organizations I've worked in or talked with over the decades. And if I don't watch it, they're also hard at work in my own brain. Among the big ones:

Confirmation Bias and Expectancy Effect
These describe our tendency to seek out and accept information that supports our hypothesis and ignore or downplay information that refutes it. Think about economic impact studies, and their seemingly endless stream of good news about how the arts impact economic activities above all other things.

The Primacy Effect and Recency Effect
These describe our tendency to remember more vividly the first item in a sequence and the last (or most recent). This stronger memory can skew our decision-making to over-emphasize these particular choices. This is a handy thing to know if your board asks you for a list of five options for moving forward on a project, and you really prefer only two of them...list one first, and one last. Cognitive bias can be your best buddy, too.

Fundamental Attribution Error (a personal favorite)
This describes our tendency to 'blame the victim' rather than attributing behavior to an individual's environment. As the wikipedia describes it: ''people tend to have a default assumption that what a person does is based more on what 'kind' of person he is, rather than the social and environmental forces at work on that person.'' This is a classic fallacy among vocal critics of social services, who perceive welfare recipients to be lazy and unmotivated rather than exploring the environment that brought them to their current condition. It's also a classic problem when we harshly judge front-line staff for being unproductive, while not providing them the resources, training, responsive leadership, and support to do the job.

And just for fun, the Lake Wobegon Effect
A tendency for most of us to perceive our abilities as 'above average.' In one study, for example, 80% of students surveyed believed they were in the top 30% of safe drivers, which certainly can't be true. This is clearly a common affliction among the authors of grants and program notes, who fling the superlatives with the best of them.

Since thoughtful and artful management is all about making thoughtful and artful decisions, a constant awareness of our own cognitive blind spots seems an essential tool of the trade.

posted on Thursday, January 27, 2005 | permalink