I recently came across a post from Farnam Street that seems like it would make a great addition to the series we’ve been exploring over the last 10 weeks (biases in judgment and decision-making). So, instead of going over another bias today, I thought I’d share the information I found and tie it back into our series. Check back next week for a new bias (it could be functional fixedness, the hindsight bias, the status quo bias, or maybe the recency/primacy effect(s)…)
The author of the Farnam Street blog summarized some of the work in Chip and Dan Heath’s new book: Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work. Given that our series is about decision-making, this book seems like it would be absolutely on-point, with regard to the closing of each post (How to avoid *blank*).
I haven’t yet read the book, but I did want to include a brief excerpt (courtesy of Farnam Street), along with a lead-in from Farnam Street:
The Heaths came up with a process to help us overcome these villains and make better choices. “We can’t deactivate our biases, but … we can counteract them with the right discipline.” The nature of each of the four decision-making villains suggests a strategy for how to defeat it.
1. You encounter a choice. But narrow framing makes you miss options. So … Widen Your Options. How can you expand your sent of choices? …
2. You analyze your options. But the confirmation bias leads you to gather self-serving information. So … Reality-Test Your Assumptions. How can you get outside your head and collect information you can trust? …
3. You make a choice. But short-term emotion will often tempt you to make the wrong one. So … Attain Distance Before Deciding. How can you overcome short-term emotion and conflicted feelings to make better choices? …
4. Then you live with it. But you’ll often be overconfident about how the future will unfold. So … Prepare to Be Wrong. How can we plan for an uncertain future so that we give our decisions the best chance to succeed? …
There’s also a handy picture that’s included (again, courtesy of Farnam Street):
As we can see, the Heaths have offered four universal ways for avoiding biases in judgment and decision-making. If we recall some of the different ways for avoiding biases that we’ve discussed over the last 9 weeks, many of them can be collapsed into one of the categories listed above. In case you’re a bit hazy, here are some of the biases that we’ve talked about before that have a “way for avoiding” that falls into one of the categories above:
- W: The Confirmation Bias, The Framing Effect, The Planning Fallacy, Loss Aversion,
- R: Overconfidence Effect, Fundamental Attribution Error,
- A: Overconfidence Effect, The Endowment Effect, Loss Aversion,
- P: The Confirmation Bias, The Endowment Effect, Sunk Cost Fallacy,
So, if you’re having trouble remembering the different ways for avoiding the biases we’ve talked about, all you have to do is remember “W-R-A-P!”
Jeremiah Stanghini 
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