Why you make terrible decisions

…..but think they’re great?

• Which of the following would you say is more dangerous - travelling by air or by road?
• Are there more words in the English language that start with ‘t’ or with ‘k’?
• Which animal do you think kills more people in a year – sharks or cows?

It’s time for the answers!

1. There are at least 400 fatalities a day due to traffic accidents in India alone. In comparison, it is estimated that the accident rate for flights is one fatal accident per 25,20,000 flights, worldwide.
2. There are in fact more words in the English language that start with ‘t’ than with ‘k’ (most of you would have got that one right, so congratulations!)
3. And finally, if the question had not been obvious enough in itself, cows do in fact kill almost 4 times as many people in a year than sharks do.

I can tell, with reasonable surety, that most of you chose the first option in any one or all the above questions, and in at least two of the cases you can see that you were wrong. Then, why is it that most of us are more scared of flights, sharks and words that start with ‘t’? (Look me in the eye and tell me that you’re not scared of taxes or trigonometry. I dare you)

It is because, there is a good chance that while answering, you made your choices based on something known as the ‘Availability Heuristic’.

The fundamental principle of the Availability Heuristic is simple – when you answered these questions, you were able to think of examples for the first option more readily than the second. In 1973, Tversky and Kahneman argued that people often judge the frequency and importance of events in the world by the ease with which examples come to their mind. All this means is that, just because you got chased by a dog – or group of dogs – once, it isn’t going to happen every time you see a Labrador on the street.

The Availability Heuristic is just one of a plethora of ‘cognitive shortcuts’ that everyone uses to make decisions on daily basis. A few of my favourites – apart from Availability of course – are, the ‘Confirmation Bias’, the ‘Hindsight Bias’, and (I’m not kidding) the ‘Good Looking People Bias’. You always knew there was a reason that that attractive colleague’s inputs were taken more seriously than yours, didn’t you?

So, why do we form these heuristics if they can ultimately lead us to make bad decisions? Simple. Have you ever bought a car or a mobile phone? Have you gone through the entire list of specifications and finally decided to go with the one that had the best price to mileage ratio (or price to camera ratio in the case of the mobile)? We make decisions with that volume of information, daily. You may not think of it as such but driving itself is a huge cognitive exercise that involves almost constant information processing and decision making. We have more information available to us today than ever before. Yet, are we really making better decisions? Not necessarily.

The fact of the matter is, we can only process so much information at a time, before our processors reach their limit. And, in some cases, this may be a good thing. When faced with a dog on the street, it may in fact be better for you to rely on the one memory you have of being chased by a dog, than to stand there and analyse every bit of information from the dog’s body language to its salivation, to the direction of the wind and the location of the nearest stone (just a sample of the kinds of data your senses can pick up in any given situation). The point being that, sometimes, we need to make quick decisions since we don’t have the resources (especially the time) to investigate an issue in depth and make a thorough assessment of the situation. And even if you could analyse all the relevant information in any given situation, chances are, you would simply get stuck in decision paralysis, because the information itself would keep changing.

This is where heuristics come into play. They enable us to make these quick – and often necessary – decisions using some cognitive shortcuts which string together the available data to make a seemingly logical conclusion. And who doesn’t like quick decisions, right?

However, heuristics – like other shortcuts – can often leave you lost. It seemed perfectly logical to take that right turn, but suddenly, you’re off-roading on a dirt track, with nothing but trees on either side of you. In the business world this can take the form of hurried, regrettable decisions about what to say, whom to say it to and how to say it. And before you know it, your project, your team or your company is off-roading.

Fear not though. All hope isn’t lost. There are quite a few ways to reduce the impact of heuristics and biases on your decision making. Here are 4 of them:

• Be mindful of your own internal environment. Remember to HALT – avoid making critical decisions if you are ‘Hungry’, ‘Angry’, ‘Lonely’ or ‘Tired’
• Look at ‘Relational Impact’ to see how others would be affected by your decision.
• You could get an outsider perspective to provide you with credible inputs – especially if their viewpoint contradicts your own (since we’re all partial to our own opinions anyway)
• Reflect on how you’ve handled a given decision in the past. Did you rush through it? Did you regret the decision later? Now’s the time to correct that.

I’m not saying that if you do these things you’ll be making amazing decisions from tomorrow, but mastery is a journey, and we all need to start walking sometime. So, the next time you think about raising your voice, skipping out on a chance to appreciate someone, or letting go of an employee, just stop, and think – Is this the best decision I can make here?