📘 The Bias Blind Side

1/50: The Bias Blind Side

Don't worry! we refrained from using sports analogies in this post 🏈

If you missed last week, we talked about what to expect for 2023. You can find that post here: https://blueprint.beehiiv.com/

We’re kicking off our list of 50 cognitive biases to cover in 50 weeks and starting to tease some of the content we’ll see in the blueprint. This week:

• 🍿 What to expect from the 50/50 bias list

• 🧠 Bias 1/50: Blind Spot Bias 

• 🖼 A free poster visualizing the 50/50 list!

What to expect from the 50/50 bias list

You’ve likely already heard about, or even studied biases and heuristics and how they impact our decision making. Since the work of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, these topics have gone mainstream - even Elon Musk tweeted that biases should be taught at a young age.

This will be a bit different..

We’ll be covering 50 biases and heuristics over the next 50 weeks - particularly as it relates to making business decisions in groups, not personal or individual decisions.

Why? A growing body of research suggests that systematic decision making in organizations can be substantially improved and correct for individual errors in judgment.

That leads us to a few beliefs the Blueprint is predicated on:

1. We do not act as rational agents¹: Human beings are not economically rational as biases and heuristics have a meaningful impact on our decision making.

2. We cannot alter the effects of bias on individuals, only organizations: Individual debiasing tends to be futile. Even being aware of these biases does not suppress them. That said, organizations can systematically correct for the impacts of individual bias.

📢 Warning! With great power comes great responsibility! Before we dive into these biases, we have two important rules that help guide the Blueprint:

Rule #1: We do not use methods that support manipulation and dark UX. We won’t be talking about strategies to manipulate choice, memory, or identity.

Rule #2: We focus on ourselves, not others. This is an introspective effort to develop better processes, not debias individuals. It’s not a blame game. We should never call out bias in others due to the inherent blindspot of our own.

That brings us to our first bias!...

Blind spot bias

As the 'glass house' of decision making, this felt like the best one to start with.

Blind spot bias, first published by Stanford researchers, is the tendency to recognize bias in others while being blind to it in ourselves. Even if we are aware of the biases and their effects, we're unable to alter our biased perceptions.

We are all susceptible to the same biases, and yet we think of ourselves as immune.

We can't 'debias' people, only processes. No individual is more or less biased than the other

Everyone has their own unique set of experiences, perspectives, and beliefs that shape the way they see and understand the world. This means that no one is immune to the influence of cognitive biases, and that everyone is equally likely to fall prey to them.

The differentiator is not being more or less biased, rather it is about the awareness and understanding that helps us build frameworks to counteract them.

“Debias training is not useless, but it's not a silver bullet for solving your problems either. Some of the research on this has shown that if all you're doing is debias training, you can expect the effects of that to last about 24 hours.” - Neil Lewis Jr., behavioral scientist at Cornell University

Intelligence can often strengthen blind spots

Blind spot bias is a self-reinforcing bias. Counterintuitively, knowing the biases and their effects can often lead to a false confidence that we won't be influenced by their effects.

As Annie Duke suggests in her book, Thinking in Bets, Blind spot bias is worse the smarter you are. Being aware of our capacity for irrationality is not enough to refrain from biased reasoning - this requires an explicit process.

Can we combat the effects of Blind Spot Bias?

Research suggests that we can't, as individuals. We can only adopt techniques that counteract the effects of the biases we are blind to, particularly when making group decisions.

Notes:

[1] There is a counter argument to the widely accepted 'biases and heuristics' (BH) model that states economical irrationality may be a feature, not a bug. The argument is that research on biases and heuristics does not accurately reflect real-world decision making and that laboratory tasks used to study these phenomena may not be representative of the complex situations that people encounter in their everyday lives. We'll try to cover these arguments in a future blog post.

A free poster!

What's a close second to free t-shirts? That's right, free sunglasses - but followed closely by free posters.

Share it on social, print it out, or use it as an advent calendar for this series - just do us a favor an link to the newsletter page or the main Blueprint website if you post it 🙂

If you share this poster on social, let us know! Either mention us (Twitter or LinkedIn) or reply to this email with a screenshot and with the next newsletter we'll send you a preview of 4 tools (out of ~50) we'll be including in the Blueprint:

• Multi-choice Criteria Scoring

• Roles & Responsibilities

• Framing

• The Speed Test

Here's the link for the high definition version:

You'll be able to find more information on these biases and tools to combat them in the Blueprint when we launch! 🚀

In the meantime, it's always great to chat with people about decision making in their organizations or get feedback on content that you'd find valuable! Please reply to this email with feedback or set up 30 minutes to chat!

Happy Wednesday!