From Chip Heath’s “Decisive”
“Confirmation bias is probably the single biggest problem in business, because even the most sophisticated people get it wrong.”
- “Our normal habit in life is to develop a quick belief about a situation and then seek out information that bolsters our belief. And that problematic habit, called the “confirmation bias,” is the second villain of decision making.”
- “Researchers have found this result again and again. When people have the opportunity to collect information from the world, they are more likely to select information that supports their preexisting attitudes, beliefs, and actions. Example- Political partisans seek out media outlets that support their side but will rarely challenge their beliefs by seeking out the other side’s perspective.”
- “this is what’s slightly terrifying about the confirmation bias: When we want something to be true, we will spotlight the things that support it, and then, when we draw conclusions from those spotlighted scenes, we’ll congratulate ourselves on a reasoned decision. Oops.”
- “People go out and they’re collecting the data, and they don’t realize they’re cooking the books.”
- “Or pity the poor contestants who try out to sing on reality TV shows, despite having no discernible ability to carry a tune. When they get harsh feedback from the judges, they look shocked. Crushed. And you realize: This is the first time in their lives they’ve received honest feedback. Eager for reassurance, they’d locked their spotlights on the praise and support from friends and family. Given that affirmation, it’s not hard to see why they’d think they had a chance to become the next American Idol. It was a reasonable conclusion drawn from a wildly distorted pool of data.” (L. 192)
So How Can You Deal With Confirmation Bias?
- “develop the discipline to consider the opposite of our initial instincts. That discipline begins with a willingness to spark constructive disagreement.”
- “Hayward and Hambrick also discovered an antidote to hubris: disagreement. They found that CEOs paid lower acquisition premiums when they had people around them who were more likely to challenge their thinking, such as an independent chairman of the board or outside board members who were unconnected to the CEO or the company.”
- “To make good decisions, CEOs need the courage to seek out disagreement. Alfred Sloan, the longtime CEO and chairman of General Motors, once interrupted a committee meeting with a question: “Gentlemen, I take it we are all in complete agreement on the decision here?” All the committee members nodded. “Then,” Sloan said, “I propose we postpone further discussion of this matter until our next meeting to give ourselves time to develop disagreement and perhaps gain some understanding of what this decision is about.” (L 1414)
- “In most legal systems, disagreement is baked into the process. Judges and juries will never find themselves in a CEO-style information bubble, since they are forced to consider two opposing points of view.”
- Get the Outside View. Click here to see how you can get the Outside View.
- Create a Devils advocate. “There are many ways to honor that spirit of values-based opposition. In some organizations, the executive in charge might assign a few people on the executive team to prepare a case against a high-stakes proposal. That’s a wise idea. It puts the team members in the role of “protecting the organization,” and it licenses their skepticism.”
“The most important lesson to learn about devil’s advocacy isn’t the need for a formal contrarian position; it’s the need to interpret criticism as a noble function.” - “How can we plan for disagreement inside organizations? Some have created devil’s advocate–style traditions. The Pentagon used a “murder board,” staffed with experienced officers, to try to kill ill-conceived missions.”
- “Another alternative is to seek out existing dissent rather than creating it artificially. If you haven’t encountered any opposition to a decision you’re considering, chances are you haven’t looked hard enough. Could you create a safe forum where critics can air their concerns?”
- “That’s the whole point of the confirmation bias—deep down, we never really want to hear the negative information. (When’s the last time you earnestly “considered the opposite” of one of your political views?) That’s why we are advocating so strongly in this book for the use of a process, something that becomes habitual. Otherwise it will be too easy to discard this advice in the heat of the moment.”
- “What we’ve seen so far is a very simple rule for analyzing your options: Take the outside view. You should distrust the inside view—those glossy pictures in your head—and instead get out of your head and consult the base rates. Sometimes those numbers are readily available, as on TripAdvisor or Yelp. Sometimes you might have to cobble them together yourself. If neither of those options is possible, try consulting an expert for their estimates of the base rates.”
How to Agree in a Disagreement
“Martin said, “If you think an idea is the wrong way to approach a problem and someone asks you if you think it’s the right way, you’ll reply ‘no’ and defend that answer against all comers. But if someone asks you to figure out what would have to be true for that approach to work, your frame of thinking changes.… This subtle shift gives people a way to back away from their beliefs and allow exploration by which they give themselves the opportunity to learn something new.”
Below is a case study which show how two teams in company, with opposite opinions, come to a good collective decision.
“As the discussion progressed, the two sides settled into their predictable roles: The executives were leaning toward closing the mine, and the mining managers opposed it. People were talking past one another. Roger Martin describes the initial discussion as “all over the map.” “I remember we’d been there probably a couple of hours,” said the treasurer, Ross. “And there was this sense of frustration. There’s a lot here to talk about. How do we work through it?” “I could tell it was going nowhere,” said Martin.
At the point of impasse, he said, “an idea popped into my head.” He issued the group a challenge: Let’s stop arguing about who is right, he said. Instead, let’s take each option, one at a time, and ask ourselves: What would have to be true for this option to be the right answer?
Surely it’s possible, he said, to imagine a set of evidence that would persuade us to change our minds. Let’s talk about what that evidence would look like. Ross said that after Roger Martin posed his challenge, “the lights went on for everyone. Participants switched from arguing to analyzing, discussing the logical underpinnings of each option.
The executives, asked to specify the conditions under which it would make sense to keep the mine open, started talking about production targets that would make it viable. The mine managers, asked to contemplate a scenario where closing the mine might be the best option, agreed that if copper prices didn’t recover, it would be hard to recommend continued operations.
The tenor of the discussion changed. There was still tension in the room, but it was productive tension. Martin’s reframing of the meeting had changed adversaries into collaborators. “It was magic,” said Martin. “By the end of the day, we had the group’s agreement on what had to be true for each of the five options for it to be the very best choice.”
Other Good Quotes About Confirmation Bias:
- “confirmation bias was stronger in emotion-laden domains such as religion or politics and also when people had a strong underlying motive to believe one way or the other (as in Upton Sinclair’s observation, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it!”). The confirmation bias also increased when people had previously invested a lot of time or effort in a given issue.”
- “In our individual decisions, how many of us have ever consciously sought out people we knew would disagree with us? Certainly not every decision needs a devil’s advocate—“I strenuously object to your purchasing those slacks!”—but for high-stakes decisions, we owe ourselves a dose of skepticism.
- “At work and in life, we often pretend that we want truth when we’re really seeking reassurance: “Do these jeans make me look fat?” “What did you think of my poem?” These questions do not crave honest answers.”
- “What if our least favorite option were actually the best one? What data might convince us of that?”
- “We know that the confirmation bias will skew our assessment. If we feel a whisker’s worth of preference for one option over another, we can be trusted to train our spotlight on favorable data.”
- “When we want something to be true, we gather information that supports our desire. But the confirmation bias doesn’t just affect what information people go looking for; it even affects what they notice in the first place.”