rotmanmagazine.ca / 37Angela Duckworth is the Founder and CEO
of the Character Lab, a non-profit whose
mission is to advance the science and practice
of character development. She is also the
Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Profes-
sor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, faculty co-director of
the Penn-Wharton Behaviour Change For Good Initiative, and faculty
co-director of Wharton People Analytics. Katherine Milkman is a Professor
at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and holds the
Evan C. Thompson Endowed Term Chair for Excellence in Teaching.
She has a secondary appointment at U Penn’s Perelman School of Medicine.This article is based on a paper made possible by support from the Chan
Zuckerberg Initiative, the National Institute of Health, the Robert Wood
Johnson Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation.As a result, solutions to enduring behaviour change carry univer-
sal benefits.
At present, organizations and academics are incentivized
to work on behaviour change in isolation, focusing on a single
setting, measuring success over the short-term. But there is an
enormous untapped opportunity for large-scale, interdisciplin-
ary work combining practical and theoretical insights to enable
sustained improvements in daily decisions on a collective level.
As Aristotle said, “We are what we repeatedly do.” If our ulti-
mate destinies derive from our daily habits, then the 21st century
may be the first in which humanity learns how to change behav-
iour for good.
(e.g. watching low-brow reality television, receiving a pedicure,
eating an indulgent meal) with engagement in a behaviour
that provides long-term benefits but requires the exertion of
willpower (e.g. exercising, reviewing a paper, spending time
with a difficult relative). Such pre-commitment devices can
increase engagement in beneficial behaviours like exercise while
reducing engagement in guilt-inducing, indulgent behaviours.
ORGANIZATIONAL COGNITIVE REPAIRS. De-biasing can
also be embedded in an organization’s routines and culture.
Researchers call these de-biasing organizational artifacts ‘cog-
nitive repairs’. A repair could be as simple as an oft-repeated
proverb that serves as a continual reminder, such as the phrase
‘don’t confuse brains with a bull market’, which cautions inves-
tors and managers to consider the base rate of success in the
market before drawing conclusions about an individual inves-
tor’s skill. Other examples include institutionalizing routines in
which senior managers recount stories about extreme failures
(to correct for the underestimation of rare events) and present-
ing new ideas and plans to colleagues trained to criticize and
poke holes (to overcome confirmatory biases and generate
alternatives).
Many successful repairs are social, taking advantage of
word-of-mouth, social influence and effective group processes
that encourage and capitalize upon diverse perspectives.
Although cognitive repairs may originate as a top-down interven-
tion, many arise organically as successful practices are noticed,
adopted, and propagated.
One cognitive repair that has not only improved many organi-
zational decisions, but saved lives, is the checklist. This tool could
easily fit in many of our de-biasing categories. Like linear models,
checklists are a potent tool for streamlining processes and thus
reducing errors. A checklist provides a list of action items or cri-
teria arranged in a systematic manner, allowing the user to record
the presence/absence of the individual item listed to ensure that
all are considered or completed.
Checklists, by design, reduce errors due to forgetfulness
and other memory distortions (e.g. over-reliance on the availabil-
ity heuristic). Some checklists are so simple that they masquer-
ade as proverbs (e.g. emergency room physicians who follow
ABC — first establish airway, then breathing, then circulation).
External checklists are particularly valuable in settings where
best practices are likely to be overlooked due to extreme com-
plexity or under conditions of high stress or fatigue, making them
an important tool for overcoming low decision readiness.— From “A User’s Guide to Debiasing” by Jack B. Soll, Katherine Milkman
and John W. Payne in The Wiley-Blackwell Handbook of Judgment and
Decision Making.