
A glass of red wine. In a fascinating study of the effects of marketing cues on the assessment of product quality, researchers conducted a blind wine tasting of three samples under laboratory conditions. The subjects were told only the prices of the wines. Without the subjects' knowledge, one sample was offered twice, once with a low price and once with a high price. All subjects consistently preferred the one they thought was more expensive. To study brain activity, the experiment was conducted using functional magnetic resonance imaging of the subjects' brains. Brain activity indicated that subjects actually experienced enhanced pleasantness when they believed they were consuming more expensive wine. See "Marketing actions can modulate neural representations of experienced pleasantness", by Hilke Plassmann, John O'Doherty, Baba Shiv, and Antonio Rangel. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, January 22, 2008, 105:3, pp. 1050-1054.
When groups make decisions about complex issues, and when complete information isn't available, they do the best they can. Sometimes they believe they're doing the best they can, but they're mistaken in that belief. One pattern that leads groups (and individuals) astray is known as confirmation bias — the tendency to search for or interpret information so as to confirm one's preconceptions. [Nickerson 1998]
We make decisions based in part on prevailing beliefs — what we hold to be true about the matter at hand. Confirmation bias distorts our decision making in three ways. It limits our access to information, it causes us to undervalue information that contradicts prevailing beliefs, and it causes us to overvalue information that confirms prevailing beliefs. Confirmation bias tends to degrade decision quality.
Oddly, even the most educated, intelligent, and accomplished among us are vulnerable to confirmation bias. Here are three indicators that a group discussion might be distorted by confirmation bias.
- Anecdotal evidence
- As a group debates the validity of a hypothesis, advocates might offer an anecdote — a narrative about a specific incident — to confirm their position. Anecdotes, even if true, cannot prove anything. They can only disprove, and to do that, they must be true.
- Anecdotes can serve only two purposes. They can be illustrations of a hypothesis, or they can disprove a hypothesis. And numbers make no difference. A million anecdotes consistent with a hypothesis do not outweigh one anecdote that provides a counterexample.
- Eerie correlations of unlikely conditions
- Some believeConfirmation bias tends to
degrade decision quality that hypotheses can be proven by patterns of unlikely events or conditions. Most noticeable when used by conspiracy theorists, this line of pseudo-reasoning is very common, though less noticed, in more mundane discussions as well. For instance, it might be used in product development, as a group speculates about the possible motives or next moves of a competitor, based on a series of hires the competitor recently made. - A humorous example of this kind of thinking is the probably apocryphal quote often attributed to the late actor Paul Newman: "24 hours in a day, 24 beers in a case. Coincidence? I think not."
- Evidence consisting of failure to disprove
- Failure to disprove a hypothesis doesn't, in itself, constitute proof of the hypothesis — it simply leaves the hypothesis standing. Some feel that if fifteen attempts to disprove fail, and only two succeed, then the odds are good that the hypothesis is true.
- Not so. If an attempt to disprove the hypothesis does succeed, then the hypothesis is disproved. There's wiggle room only if the various attempts to disprove are each suggestive, but inconclusive.
Next time we'll examine some of the effects of confirmation bias on thought processes. Next issue in this series
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More articles on Emotions at Work:
When You Can't Even Think About It
- Some problems are so difficult or scary that we can't even think about how to face them. Until we can
think, action is not a good idea. How can we engage our brains for the really scary problems?
Social Safety Margins
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less time for the social niceties that protect us from accidentally hurting each other's feelings. When
are we most at risk of incidental harm, and what can we do about it?
Toxic Conflict in Virtual Teams: Dissociative Anonymity
- Toxic conflict in teams disrupts relationships and interferes with (or prevents) accomplishment of the
team's goals. It's difficult enough to manage toxic conflict in co-located teams, but in virtual teams,
dissociative anonymity causes toxic conflict to be both more easily triggered and more difficult to resolve.
When Somebody Throws a Nutty
- To "throw a nutty" — at work, that is — can include anything from extreme verbal
over-reaction to violent physical abuse of others. When someone exhibits behavior at the milder end
of this spectrum, what responses are appropriate?
Human Limitations and Meeting Agendas
- Recent research has discovered a class of human limitations that constrain our ability to exert self-control
and to make wise decisions. Accounting for these effects when we construct agendas can make meetings
more productive and save us from ourselves.
See also Emotions at Work and Emotions at Work for more related articles.
Forthcoming issues of Point Lookout
Coming May 14: Working with the Overconfident
- A cognitive bias known as the Overconfidence Effect causes us to overestimate the reliability of our judgments. Decisions we make based on those judgments are therefore suspect. But there are steps we can take to make our confidence levels more realistic, and thus make our decisions more reliable. Available here and by RSS on May 14.
And on May 21: Mismanaging Project Managers
- Most organizations hold project managers accountable for project performance. But they don't grant those project managers control of needed resources. Nor do they hold project sponsors or other senior managers accountable for the consequences of their actions when they interfere with project work. Here's a catalog of behaviors worth looking at. Available here and by RSS on May 21.
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