Cognitive Biases: Can it Really Happen to Me?

Jim Brosseau March 31, 2011

5th VanQ presentation! Sponsorship has its privileges! - great place to play with new topics, todays no exception Me: tech, CAATS, PMP, consulting, book, facilitator lets have a discussion here, swap perspectives for insights Were nuts: always looking for the silver bullet - missing something sitting right under our nose? - nature of being human affects how we work? look differently...not either/or, but in addition to... Not sure where this will go, group will have lots of insights Acknowledge Patrick - just starting down this path Overview: characteristics, examples, group discussions - litmus test - has this idea got any legs?

Heres an example of a bias that affects many of us this ones called the Bias Blind Spot Denition: Tendency to see oneself as less susceptible to bias than others, and failing to adequately compensate for ones biases. any example from the workplace? - I dont need to test my stuff... - Im sure I considered all the possibilities... Given all the potential biases around, I think we all have this to some degree

bias bs
noun 1 prejudice in favor of or against one thing, person, or group compared with another, usually in a way considered to be unfair : there was evidence of bias against foreign applicants | the bias toward younger people in recruitment | [in sing. ] a systematic bias in favor of the powerful. Statistics a systematic distortion of a statistical result due to a factor not allowed for in its derivation.

Bias dened - I lean toward the statistics denition - that factor is us! Cognitive biases - a deviation in judgment that occurs in particular situations Unconscious Cross -cultural Age independent Not avoidable through raw intelligence, personal effort, or introspection Weve all got these things, to varying degrees

An example

I need a volunteer I give a seq. of numbers that are generated by a rule You try to guess that rule that Im using How? You come up with a potential next number, - I say Yes or No (it follows the rule) (goes on till we a) get the idea or b) see the series diverge from the preconceived set) Conrmation bias: search for or interpret information in a way that conrms ones preconceptions. - Were at VanQ - how does this impact our ability to build and test quality products? Psychologists in other disciplines, in a naive situation: minuscule chance this wont work

A taxonomy
Decision making and behaviour Probability and belief Social and attributional Memory errors

Research into biases and technology teams - sparse Why look at this for tech teams? - potential benefits - cause and effect, early decisions, rework... Decision making behaviour Planning Fallacy: underestimate task-completion times. Probability and Belief Authority Bias: value an ambiguous stimulus according to the opinion of someone who is seen as an authority on the topic. Bandwagon Effect: do or believe things because many others do the same. Agile, anyone? Social and attributional: Dunning-Kruger Effect: less-skilled individuals over-rate their capabilities, and skilled individuals under-rate them. Estimation, anyone? Memory errors Consistency bias: incorrectly recall ones past attitudes and behaviours as similar to those of the present

"One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are lled with doubt and indecision." Bertrand Russell

The DunningKruger effect is a cognitive bias in which unskilled people make poor decisions and reach erroneous conclusions, but their incompetence denies them the metacognitive ability to appreciate their mistakes. The effect is not specically limited to the observation that ignorance of a topic is conducive to overcondent assertions about it, and Dunning and Kruger cite a study saying that 94% of college professors rank their work as "above average" (relative to their peers), to underscore that the highly intelligent and informed are hardly exempt.!

Part 1: Exploring Cognitive Biases

Hand out worksheets: will collect them up, PDF the lot, post them afterwards Capture insights on sheets put people into groups of 4-5 (6 groups max) hand out bias cards - about a dozen distribute to the group Individually: read your cards, try to ID examples in the tech workplace (5 minutes) Within group: present your examples to the others in the group (10 minutes) Within group: voting - pick your 3 favourite biases and examples Larger group: get examples from each group (capture on whiteboard)

So they exist in the workplace - now what? Cognitive biases are evolved mental behaviour - some adaptive, some due to lack (or misapplication) of appropriate mechanisms - lets look at one of these misapplications Brains wired for a world that ceased to exist long ago ght/ight - amygdala - served us with sabre toothed tigers Garter snake vs. global warming - well freak over one, blithely go on with the other need to train ourselves to use our pre-frontal cortex Awareness > empowering > evolution got a long way to go, cognitive biases are similar...

One possible approach?

"Inhibitory Spillover: Increased Urination Urgency Facilitates Impulse Control in Unrelated Domains" The APS journal Psychological Science

In one experiment, participants either drank five cups of water (about 750 milliliters), or took small sips of water from five separate cups. Then, after about 40 minutesthe amount of time it takes for water to reach the bladderthe researchers assessed participants self-control. Participants were asked to make eight choices; each was between receiving a small, but immediate, reward and a larger, but delayed, reward. For example, they could choose to receive either $16 tomorrow or $30 in 35 days. The researchers found that the people with full bladders were better at holding out for the larger reward later. Other experiments reinforced this link; for example, in one, just thinking about words related to urination triggered the same effect. You seem to make better decisions when you have a full bladder, Tuk says. So maybe you should drink a bottle of water before making a decision about your stock portfolio, for example. Or perhaps stores that count on impulse buys should keep a bathroom available to customers, since they might be more willing to go for the television with a bigger screen when they have an empty bladder. The results were a little surprising from a theoretical point of view; a lot of research in psychology has supported the concept of ego depletionthat having to restrain yourself wears out your brain and makes it harder to exert self-control over something else. But Tuk says this seems to work in a different way, maybe because bladder control is largely an automatic, unconscious process.

What about this one? Follows pattern of Agile Manifesto Expect that there are a number of these out already I see them as each having a different perspective on this challenge as such, each can provide a unique dimension to solving the problem All these perspectives are complementary, each is insufficient For me, this resonates more than the Agile manifesto, though I hope it does not spawn as many messianic dogmas as consultants.

Part II: Managing Cognitive Biases

second set of cards to the group: - Collection of approaches - Blank cards - deal out as before - blanks to be used as needed For the key biases identied - individually, then within group - would these remedies help at all? - could they even make matters worse? - other potential solutions? Group debrief - highlights from each - relevant remedies? - potential problems - other ideas?

How can this help us?

Raised awareness within a team to increase
sensitivity to biases?

Process components to systematically

remove particular biases? biases on projects?

Teams serve to average out the effect of Other ways?

its a psychology issue, not a technical issue recall the huge costs on tech projects were typically not looking for these biases Recall the Biases denition up front: - a factor not allowed for in its derivation none of the solutions we use address them all a new approach for remediation is required

Thoughts?
Jim Brosseau jim.brosseau@clarrus.com www.clarrus.com

So - has this idea got legs? Could we be on to something here? Were there any biases we were guilty of this evening? - Conrmation Bias? - Semmelweis Bias? - Anchoring? - Blind Spot? - Framing? Thoughts? Questions?