
Casino dice. Making an important decision without taking cognitive biases — especially Evaluability Bias — into account is like rolling dice. Image by Grizzlybear-se courtesy Pixabay.com
Among the more recently described cognitive biases is one known as the Evaluability Bias. It is "the tendency to weight the importance of an attribute in proportion to its ease of evaluation, rather than based on criteria that are deemed as more relevant after reflection." [Caviola, et al. 2014] Said differently, when assessing the value of an option, we assign importance to the option's attributes. The Evaluability Bias causes us to tend to assign too little importance to attributes that are relatively difficult to evaluate, compared to the importance we assign to attributes that are relatively easy to evaluate.
What Evaluability Bias is
Caviola et al. provide a careful study of this phenomenon in the domain of charitable giving. They find that when deciding which charities to support, donors tend to assign too much importance to the "overhead ratio," an easily measured attribute that corresponds to the ratio of administrative expenses to total donations. And donors assign too little importance to cost-effectiveness, which is a much more difficult-to-measure quantity that is, essentially, the value of good works done per unit value of donations.
We can Evaluability Bias causes us to tend to assign too little
importance to attributes that are relatively difficult
to evaluate, compared to the importance we assign to
attributes that are relatively easy to evaluateunderstand other cognitive biases, described earlier in the history of cognitive biases, in terms of Evaluability Bias. One example is a bias known asscope insensitivity or scope neglect. [Kahneman 2000] Originally named extension neglect by Kahneman, scope neglect is the tendency to assign inappropriately low weight to the quantity, scale, or scope of the option in question. For example, when comparing the importance of abuse of different drugs, people tend not to take into account the scale of the drug's abuse: differences in the number of abusers of each drug.
Evaluability Bias and technical debt
In the workplace, Evaluability Bias can have alarmingly deleterious effects. For example, nearly every organization depends on rational decision-making in the context of software development, either because they produce software products, or because they have business technology functions that produce software for internal use.
And because technical debt is a live issue that can afflict all software, it's important to make rational decisions about retiring existing technical debt and about preventing formation of new technical debt. Evaluability Bias is relevant because those decisions inevitably involve choosing which instances of technical debt we will retire. One of the important attributes of these choices is the cost of not retiring it. The cost of not retiring a specific class or instance of technical debt is often neglected, but even when we consider it, it is an attribute most notoriously difficult to measure.
Last words
When consider training for ourselves or for others, we tend not to consider training in limiting the effects of cognitive biases in decision-making. Surely it would be helpful, even if calculating its value with any useful degree of accuracy would be challenging. Evaluability Bias, ironically, might be playing a role in preventing organizations from training their people in methods for limiting the effects of Evaluability Bias. Top
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Related articles
More articles on Cognitive Biases at Work:
Neglect of Probability
- Neglect of Probability is a cognitive bias that leads to poor decisions. The risk of poor decisions
is elevated when we must select an option from a set in which some have outstandingly preferable possible
outcomes with low probabilities of occurring.
Risk Acceptance: One Path
- When a project team decides to accept a risk, and when their project eventually experiences that risk,
a natural question arises: What were they thinking? Cognitive biases, other psychological phenomena,
and organizational dysfunction all can play roles.
Unrecognized Bullying: III
- Much workplace bullying goes unrecognized because of cognitive biases that can cause targets, perpetrators,
bystanders, and supervisors of perpetrators not to notice bullying. The Halo Effect and the Horn Effect
are two of these biases.
Clouted Thinking
- When we say that people have "clout" we mean that they have more organizational power or social
influence than most others do. But when people with clout try to use it in realms beyond those in which
they've earned it, trouble looms.
The Risk Planning Fallacy
- The planning fallacy is a cognitive bias that causes underestimates of cost, time required, and risks
for projects. Analogously, I propose a risk planning fallacy that causes underestimates of probabilities
and impacts of risk events.
See also Cognitive Biases at Work for more related articles.
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