Want to grow your career and leadership capability? Cognitive Bias is a crucial concept you should deeply understand.
What’s Cognitive Bias?
Click the “play” button below and watch a funny TikTok short video first and then answer a surprising question from me below.
Question: Why do you find this video funny?
Bingo! At the 6th second, there is a moment of “surprise”. Your brain thinks someone else was holding the spoon. However, it turned out to be the woman herself. Before the 6th second, how come your brain automatically think someone else was holding the spoon? Did you do an analysis at that moment? No. “Cognitive Bias” did the magic for you without you knowing it. Unconsciously, your brain was trying to simplify your information processing. Because the spoon came into the frame from the right side of the screen, your brain automatically completed the picture outside of the screen that someone else on the right side was holding the spoon. However, in this case, your brain screwed up and made the wrong “picture auto-completion”. This is exactly an example of Cognitive Bias, which is a systematic error in the way people process information. Cognitive Bias could benefit us with super fast decision making, however it could also hurt us by making wrong decisions.
How to Deal With Cognitive Bias?
At the 6th second, the camera zoomed out. That is a big deal! Firstly, it revealed the flaw that your brain made and created the aha moment that made you feel funny. Secondly, it gave us a powerful tool to defend against the Cognitive Bias. In the real world, you should separate facts (what you see in the frame of the video above) and assumptions (what you don’t see outside the frame of the video above). Validate your assumption by collecting more evidence (zooming out the camera in the video above).
Why Knowing and Overcoming Cognitive Bias is Important?
In work and life, we need to deal with a lot of ambiguity. When information is not complete, Cognitive Bias kicks in and our brain started to show off its tricks by auto-completing our information intake/processing and short-circuiting our decision making. It does a bunch of things right and a bunch wrong. If we are aware of when Cognitive Bias kicks in and know how to “zoom out” so we can reduce the wrong decisions, we will achieve more positive results.
Conclusion
Everyone should watch TikTok or Instagram Reels videos, because they make you wiser! … I’m kidding! 😜
I’ll do more deep dive into various kinds of Cognitive Bias in future posts and how they apply in daily work and life. Subscribe to my newsletter below to receive my future updates and more exclusive content.
Great post. One addition to how to deal with Cognitive Bias is,
Step 1: Consider all possibilities(it could be one possibility or a multitude of possibilities, depending on the situation and the ability of the individual) at the time of making a decision.
Step 2: Make a justifiable/accountable decision.
Step 3: Keep an open mind to revisit the decision when new data is available, own up for the previous decision(good or bad) and go back to Step 1.
Nice to hear from you, Pushkar! You made great points! I agree in most cases, it’s impossible to gather full info, so proactively thinking through all possibilities and always be accountable and be ready to revise the decision based on new data is key to optimize the outcome. Thank you, Pushkar!