rotmanmagazine.ca / 43Anuj K. Shah is an Associate Professor of
Behavioural Science at the University of
Chicago’s Booth School of Business. He is also
a member of the Scientific Advisory Board at
ideas42, a social science research and develop-
ment laboratory that uses scientific insights to design innovative policies and
products. Jens Ludwig is the McCormick Foundation Professor of Social
Service Administration, Law and Public Policy at the University of Chicago’s
School of Social Service Administration and Director of the University
of Chicago Crime Lab. The complete paper on which this article is based,
“Option Awareness: The Psychology of What We Consider” was published
in the American Economic Review and can be downloaded online.know who is responsible for reviewing their returns; and firms
filing annual earnings reports may not know who inspects
these results. Providing some information about those respon-
sible for monitoring could help to reduce the feeling of ano-
nymity among those being monitored.
In closing
The standard economic view assumes that people take an ac-
tion when the benefits exceed the costs, and that therefore, to
intervene on a behaviour, one must change the costs and ben-
efits. But before a person can even consider the costs and ben-
efits of an action, they have to think of that action.
We suggest that cognitive accessibility is a major driver
of which actions people consider, and hence of how they be-
have. Ultimately, if we can understand the psychological pa-
rameters that lead people to consider an action, we can attempt
to design interventions that lead them to think of different
possibilities.Chip Heath is the Thrive Foundation for Youth Professor of Organizational
Behaviour at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business. He is the
co-author of Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work (Random
House, 2013). Carla O’Dell is CEO of APQC, one of the leading proponents
of benchmarking and best practice business research. For more: apqc.org.reading them even-handedly. But in actuality, you are about twice as
likely to read a two-star review as a four star review, because you really
want this place to be good.
Getting away from confirmation bias is very difficult. One trick is to
learn to ask yourself ‘disconfirming questions’—that is, to test the idea that
the opposite of your hypothesis is true. In the workplace, we can do this
with each other. For example, ‘There are reasons for doing this merger, but
what are the reasons not to do it?’ Of course, the problem in organizations
is that, even though disconfirming questions are useful for making good
decisions, asking them can make one look like less of a team player. CEOs
aren’t always pleased when somebody raises a counter-argument to an
idea they’re excited about.
That’s why it’s important to make asking ‘disconfirming questions’
easier. You might start to ask your team these questions as part of your
project planning process, or even do a ‘pre-mortem’ exercise and envision
everything that might go wrong. By including this as part of the process,
people don’t have to take on the unenviable role of ‘devil’s advocate’.
Why have ideas from cognitive science and neuroscience begun
to get so much traction in business?
When Prof. Kahneman won the Nobel Prize in 2006, we [academics]
recognized that what we had been doing was as important as we thought
it was, for all these years. Kahneman started the trend of thinking about
how to take these ideas from the research context and farm them out to
people at work in organizations.
When it comes to bringing ideas from cognitive science to the
business world, the potential gains are huge, and the costs are tiny. If you
asked a group of top global leaders about the decisions in their organiza-
tions, about half of them will say that they make as many mistakes as
they do correct decisions. That is a shocking statistic. Clearly, there is
an asymmetric payoff for getting top-level decisions in better shape.