What are common biases that affect your decision-making?

This type of bias is the single greatest reason for coerced confessions. Having corroborated evidence before the interrogation leads to effective questioning that uses open dialogue and not closed questions with predetermined outcomes.

Confirmation bias is an extremely dangerous bias for any professional in that it stifles critical thinking. As human beings, we tend to gravitate towards people that are similar to us, but that can cause echo chambers, where we only hear one perspective. In order to overcome confirmation bias, we need to actively seek out perspectives, opinions, and ideas that are different than ours. After all, how many of us have made a bad decision that may have been preventable if we had only listened to that contrary opinion?

All good arguments to increase diversity. People who don’t look like you offer different perspectives, forcing you to consider thoughts you otherwise wouldn’t.

People often fail to recognize the variability of situations, where the quantity and quality of process inputs change over time or while incidents are occurring. As an example, Investors are often trapped by economic downturns because they only see the immediate gains and not the possibility of future loss.

President Kennedy fell victim to groupthink, an uncritical acceptance of the group's point of view, when he agreed to the Bay of Pigs invasion. Groupthink can lead to framing bias in that it leads us to looking at problems in singular ways. What President Kennedy learned after the failed invasion was that he needed someone in the group to offer a competing perspective to his own ideas. So he assigned his brother, Robert, to be his devil's advocate offering opinions and ideas which were contrary to the President's belief. If you want to overcome framing bias, you need to generate new perspectives either by playing the devil's advocate role yourself or by acting like President Kennedy and assigning someone to disagree with you.

How many times as an investor have you looked at a stock and kicked yourself for not purchasing it earlier? If you have done that, you have fallen victim to the hindsight bias. When you make decisions, you do not have the luxury of knowing the outcome so you are destined to make decision-making errors. How we analyze the decision will be a predictor of how we make future decisions. Instead of lamenting the lost opportunity, we can use the situation to analyze how me made the decision. From there, we can critically assess the things we did wrong or the information we overlooked so that we can change our thought processes and make better decisions in the future.

Insensitivity to the rules of probability and chance: This is the tendency to disregard the role of sample size and the randomness of events. Most people simply do not understand the rules that govern patterns of normality and non-normality as measures for potential outcomes. A single occurrence is often accepted as a predictor for future happenings. Individuals are unable to appreciate that small samples are not likely to represent the true nature of forthcoming situations. In addition, people will tend to see patterns in multiple events as trends and find linkages where none exist. They accept anecdotal information as true; take large chances based on unrepresentative evidence and make choices that are mostly a roll-of-the-dice.