Choice blindness
The excellent book “The Illusionist Brain: The Neuroscience of Magic” talks about an experiment done with supermarket customers, where they were asked to sample and then choose between two different kinds of jam. After that decision was made, they were asked to try the jam they had selected again and then explain why they had selected it.
Social proof in meetings
I’ve been in quite a few meetings recently where people are speaking in a passive voice, and saying things like “maybe someone could do this thing”. Naturally nobody does.
Survivor Bias
“Survivor bias is the logical error of concentrating on entities that passed a selection process while overlooking those that did not. This can lead to incorrect conclusions because of incomplete data.”
— Wikipedia”
Cognitive Bias
It would be easy to think that all cognitive bias is a bad thing. When we hear people talking about it, it’s often in the context of the collection of biases that make up racism or sexism or other generally negative things. Yet, the truth is that cognitive bias is the way that our brain manages energy use and is overwhelmingly a positive thing for us.
Fixation errors
Back in the 1990’s, it wasn’t uncommon for people to check code into the repository that didn’t work. Sometimes it wouldn’t even compile.
Outcome bias (Resulting)
When I first read How to Decide: Simple Tools for Making Better Choices by Annie Duke, one of my biggest aha moments was from what she calls Resulting and is more formally known as Outcome Bias.
Inattentional blindness
Inattentional blindness is when we are so focused on some things that we completely miss other things that should be completely obvious. This can be used to hilarious effect, as you’ll see below, and at the same time is something we need to take into account in business.