Evaluability Bias

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    Next Issue

Are your projects always (or almost always) late and over budget? Are your project teams plagued by turnover, burnout, and high defect rates? Turn your culture around. Read 52 Tips for Leaders of Project-Oriented Organizations, filled with tips and techniques for organizational leaders. Order Now!

Footnotes

Your comments are welcome

About Point Lookout

Thank you for reading this article. I hope you enjoyed it and found it useful, and that you'll consider recommending it to a friend.

This article in its entirety was written by a human being. No machine intelligence was involved in any way.

Point Lookout is a free weekly email newsletter. Browse the archive of past issues. Subscribe for free.

Support Point Lookout by joining the Friends of Point Lookout, as an individual or as an organization.

Do you face a complex interpersonal situation? Send it in, anonymously if you like, and I'll give you my two cents.

Related articles

More articles on Cognitive Biases at Work:

Motivated Reasoning

When we prefer a certain outcome of a decision process, we risk falling into a pattern of motivated reasoning. That can cause us to gather data and construct arguments that erroneously lead to the outcome we prefer, often outside our awareness. And it can happen even when the outcome we prefer is known to threaten our safety and security.

Motivated Reasoning and the Pseudocertainty Effect

When we have a preconceived notion of what conclusion a decision process should produce, we sometimes engage in "motivated reasoning" to ensure that we get the result we want. That's risky enough as it is. But when we do this in relation to a chain of decisions in the context of uncertainty, trouble looms.

Seven More Planning Pitfalls: III

Planning teams, like all teams, are vulnerable to several patterns of interaction that can lead to counter-productive results. Two of these relevant to planners are a cognitive bias called the IKEA Effect, and a systemic bias against realistic estimates of cost and schedule.

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.

Additive bias…or Not: II

Additive bias is a cognitive bias that many believe contributes to bloat of commercial products. When we change products to make them more capable, additive bias might not play a role, because economic considerations sometimes favor additive approaches.

See also Cognitive Biases at Work for more related articles.

Forthcoming issues of Point Lookout

Coming August 13: Leaving High-Touch Jobs: How

High-touch jobs require that we work closely with colleagues, teammates, clients, or suppliers. Because choosing to leave such a job affects all these people, and the person departing, we would do well find a path that respects all involved. Here are some suggestions. Available here and by RSS on August 13.

And on August 20: Earned Value and Goodhart's Law

Earned Value Management, widely used approach to project management, is most useful in contexts in which estimators are familiar with the Tasks, the Technologies, and the Teams. But even then, it is vulnerable to the tactics of those who game the metrics. Available here and by RSS on August 20.

Coaching services

I offer email and telephone coaching at both corporate and individual rates. Contact Rick for details at rbrenaXXxGCwVgbgLZDuRner@ChacDjdMAATPdDNJnrSwoCanyon.com or (650) 787-6475, or toll-free in the continental US at (866) 378-5470.

Get the ebook!

Past issues of Point Lookout are available in six ebooks:

• Get 2001-2 in Geese Don't Land on Twigs (PDF, )
• Get 2003-4 in Why Dogs Wag (PDF, )
• Get 2005-6 in Loopy Things We Do (PDF, )
• Get 2007-8 in Things We Believe That Maybe Aren't So True (PDF, )
• Get 2009-10 in The Questions Not Asked (PDF, )
• Get all of the first twelve years (2001-2012) in The Collected Issues of Point Lookout (PDF, )

Are you a writer, editor or publisher on deadline? Are you looking for an article that will get people talking and get compliments flying your way? You can have 500-1000 words in your inbox in one hour. License any article from this Web site. More info