The 9 human cognitive biases that worsened the pandemic outcome

I usually study people in the arena of shopping. It’s endlessly fascinating. We are not logical machines doing the “sensible thing”. If we were, marketing wouldn’t work. But this lack of logic extends into far more significant matters—the Pandemic for example. So, today I thought I’d look at known sources of bias and consider their potential impact on this. It makes a neat case study to help understand the nature of the bias phenomenon

What are biases? Well, humans have built-in tendencies to behave and think specific, somewhat predictable, but illogical ways. These are well tested and proven. Presumably, they are “baked in” by evolution and in the distant past served our species well. 

But when something of the enormity of Covid19 comes along (and even in shopping), I’d argue they serve us pretty poorly.

Here are nine I think we can see have been most at play:

Anchoring – whatever we first learn, we tend to hang onto. So early statements that “it’s not much worse than flu” had a huge impact, way after they ought to have done.

Availability Heuristic. We worry far more about things we perceive to be “close to hand” or familiar. We didn’t pay much attention to a crisis in Wuhan, a place and people we don’t know.

Optimism bias. Despite the evidence, we will tend to expect things to be better than a worse case. As in the government, we do not want to start a lockdown.

The bandwagon effect – we tend to jump on in if everyone else is doing it. So, if everyone is going to the park, then why not?

Belief bias – where we can easily ignore the logic of the argument if we find it hard to believe or get our heads around the conclusions. E.g. Politicians would take little action on scientific predictions of a pandemic for the last ten years because the impact indeed seemed pretty unpleasant.

Recency Bias. This is very evident on Linked in. We give far more intention to the immediate, the here and now. We are very poor at putting things into historical relativity or context. Hence lots of discussion about how Covid will change the world tempered by little attention to many other crucial issues facing the world.

Fading effect bias. We will tend to be blasé about illness and death because our memories tend to downplay these over time. We remember far and feel more strongly about past positive life events than negative ones. So, early on the theory of Covid didn’t scare us. The reality did too much (see recency bias).

System justification. We will always tend to want to keep things the way they are. Even if maintaining things as they are (i.e. not shutting down) will logically cause problems, we have a bias to not changing.

The Dunning Kruger effect. A little bit of knowledge goes a long way because we too easily fool ourselves we know what we are talking about. Whereas being an expert, conversely leads to a greater sense of uncertainty. So, we the lay public with one internet article under our belt are confident in telling the politicians where they are going wrong, whereas the government scientific advisors find it extremely challenging to give unambiguous advice. This matters because politicians can be tempted to respond to the “public mood”.

So what?

This is a very superficial canter across the topic, and I’d not claim to be an expert. But it does make it clear to me that more focus should be given to biases by the scientific and civil servant (government) leadership. Those we charge with taking a longer view of doing the right thing for long term success have to be willing and able to challenge these kinds of biases. At least to be aware of them. Is it even on the civil service training courses I wonder?

Meanwhile, to any student of shopping, this is an equally important topic to get to grips with.