Biased beings

We are always beset with one bias or the other and this clouds our decision-making

We often revisit our decisions. The thought of 'Ah, that was a bad decision' haunts us, but we take it as a lesson learned and move forward. I do that very often. The other day I decided to take a walk after recovering from a severe back problem. I thought a little walk would be okay, but halfway through, my legs started hurting and I started regretting my decision to walk.I was curious about why I made that decision. I knew I had not fully recovered. I now realize that one of my cognitive biases screwed my decision process at the time. This particular bias is called choice-supportive bias. Apart from this we have a number of other biases that cloud our decision-making.

We have tendency to over-rely on the first piece of information we get. Remember the first salary negotiation. Your employer made the first offer and thus established a range of reasonable possibilities in your mind. This is an example of anchoring bias. As we move along in life, we fall prey to all kinds of biases.

The other bias is the availability of heuristics. If you are a smoker or a drinker, you will be familiar with what I am saying. I am sure you know that drinking or smoking is not good for you, but you need an excuse. So you argue that you know someone who drinks and smokes regularly and has lived for 100 years. Thus, you feel good about drinking and smoking.

This leads to another kind of bias, failing to recognize your own bias. We tend to notice every other person's bias, but not our own. This is called blind-spot bias. While busy with this, another bias creeps in. We listen to information that confirms our preconceptions. This makes it difficult to have an intelligent conversation and leads to failure of discussions on complex issues. This is called confirmation bias, followed by another bias: conservatism bias.

Majority of our population is still held back by conservative views especially related to culture. We easily accept older explanation of facts even though we have new scientific evidence that might be exactly opposite. An excellent example is the time taken to accept that the earth was round because people understood it to be flat for a long time.

Then again the other extreme is when people weigh the latest information more heavily than older data. This is more relevant to investors who often think that market will always look the way it looks today and make unwise decisions. Such is the recency bias.

Then there is the survivorship bias. It's our tendency to focus on surviving examples that lead to an error in our judgment. Just because we have not heard about failures of other people, we think that being an entrepreneur is easy. Often we allow our expectations to influence how we look at things. This is our selective perception at work. Perfect example is one football team seeing the opposing team committing more violations. This is something we see all the time. While we are victims of this bias, we often ignore negative information, just like an ostrich 'burying' its head in the sand. I usually do that when I am watching cricket. Especially if my team is losing, I don't check the scores often. Rightly, this is called ostrich effect.

As Dashain and Tihar are approaching, I am reminded of the harmless card playing ritual during the festival season. It is done purely for entertainment in good faith and humor. It becomes a problem when it turns into serious gambling. This gives rise to various gambling fallacies, seeing winning patterns that results in a person playing more, investing more money and losing more thus becoming a victim of clustering illusion.

With every win, there comes a sense of overconfidence causing the person to take even more risk. Expert gamblers are more prone to this than others, since with every game they are more convinced they are right. These people are also victims of outcome bias. Just because they won a few games does not mean gambling away their money is smart. They base their decision on outcome rather than how they made the decision to put more money in the game.

So life is full of biases that cloud our decision-making. We are familiar with following biases: information bias that makes a person look for more information than necessary. More information does not always help make better decisions. Pro-innovation bias influences those who have innovated something, but are not willing to see the drawbacks of it. They see only positive aspects of their innovation. Then there is the placebo effect. A case of simply believing that something will have a certain effect on you causes it to have that effect. People given fake pills often experience the same psychological effects as people given the real thing.

Then there is bandwagon bias that we frequently encounter in meetings, where the probability of one person adopting a belief increases, based on the number of people who agree to that belief. This powerful form of groupthink is the reason why some meetings are unproductive.

Finally we as women are still stereotyped. It's not long since women were stereotyped as nurses, office secretaries, schoolteachers and receptionists. Having said this, it is natural for us to avoid bias while making decisions. We love certainty even if it's counterproductive. Eliminating risk entirely means there is no chance of any harm being caused. This is zero-risk bias. Now, isn't that interesting?

The author is an educationist and author of several children's books
usha@pokharel.net

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