Cognitive Bias What It Is and Why You Should Care

What is Cognitive Bias

Neuroscience has found that the brain tends to use heuristics that act as mental shortcuts to process information and make decisions. While these mental shortcuts often produce “good enough” decisions, they tend to be suboptimal decisions. Cognitive bias is the term used to describe the brain’s tendency to use mental short cuts to make decisions.

?One way to think about cognitive bias is a machine learning algorithm that uses

?·????????Classification – Four legs, fur, and barks. It’s a dog.

·???????? Association – I was attacked by a dog when I was young.

·???????? Prediction – That dog is going to attack me.

The dog may or may not be going to attack me. But based on my childhood experience my brain decides the dog is threat. I’m not objectively evaluating the facts of the current reality to determine the best course of action; hence my decision-making is biased.

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Why Does Cognitive Bias Exist

Cognitive bias developed as a survival mechanism to keep us safe in the world by acting fast to reduce risk. The processing mechanisms of cognitive bias are non-conscious . It speeds processing and decision making by shortcutting the need to gather every piece of information, verify its accuracy, and evaluate its impact, every time we make decisions.

If you are driving your car and someone cuts in front of you, what do you do? In most cases you slam on the brakes. You don’t evaluate how fast you are going and how close you are to the other car, so you can determine how much pressure you need to apply to the brakes.

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How Does Cognitive Bias Impact Decision Making

Cognitive bias reduces objective evaluation and creates resistance to change.

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Reduce Risk: The brain tends to prioritize safety over reward.

??????? We feel loss more strongly than an equal gain.

??????? We overly focus on the potential regret of decisions.

??????? We avoid disruption to normal routines and processes

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Act Fast: The brain tends to prioritize speed over accuracy.

??????? We default to what worked in the past.

??????? We decide based on recent or memorable events.

??????? We filter and weight data to support experience and memory.

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Conserve Energy: The brain tends to prioritize efficiency over accuracy.

??????? We overemphasize the first piece of information received.

??????? We defer to others based on authority or status.

??????? We prefer options based on group preferences.

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Expand Capacity: The brain tends to prioritize completion over value.

??????? We prioritize immediate rewards over long term benefits.

??????? We assume previous success will lead to future success.

??????? We prefer know options over unknown ones.

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How Can We Mitigate Cognitive Bias

The first step is acknowledging that cognitive bias exists and impacts our decision-making. The nonconscious nature of cognitive bias makes it difficult for us to self-detect, in real-time as we are making decisions.?However, we can see cognitive bias in others which means at an organizational level we can design tools, frameworks, and processes to discuss and mitigate cognitive bias.

The RACE framework is based on the brain’s priorities. If the framework is socialized internally as part of a data literacy program for example, it provides a way to discuss how cognitive bias may be impacting decision making, based on how the brain tends to process information and make decisions.

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Why You Should Care About Cognitive Bias

The Data and AI Executive Leadership Survey has found that nearly 80% of data and analytics leaders say they are challenged by people and behavior. And this has been the single biggest challenge for years. It directly impacts how well our organizations use data and analytics to make decisions and improve business outcomes. Acknowledging cognitive bias exists and using tools like the RACE framework can help you increase.

• Stakeholder Engagement: By making it clear how and why cognitive bias exists, and how stakeholders can reduce it in their decisions.?
• ?Shared Understanding: By providing a common language for discussing and evaluating cognitive bias among stakeholders.
• ?Critical Thinking: By encouraging individuals to consider different perspectives, evaluate assumptions, and recognize bias.

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