Avoid This Mental Shortcut & Make Faster Decisions with Lesser Info Instead(Here is how?)
“Very often, when you change your perspective, you see things differently, make different decisions, and get different results.” ~Brian Tracy
Who doesn’t want to make choices at a snap of fingers?
Who doesn’t need mental short cuts to quickly make complex decisions?
After all it’s only after one decides, then only the things start moving. But some short-cuts misguide us that lead to bad decisions.
Once such mental short cut is Availability Heuristics!
The availability heuristic is a mental shortcut that relies on immediate examples that come to a given person’s mind when evaluating a specific topic, concept, method or decision.
Availability heuristic indicates that we make our decisions mostly based on the recency of the events. We often misjudge the frequency and magnitude of the events that have happened recently because of the limitation of our memory. Also, we remember those things better when they have come in a vivid narrative.
How Performance Evaluations Get Biased?
According to Harvard professor Max Bazerman, managers conducting performance appraisals often fall victim to the availability heuristic. The recency of events plays a vital role in performance appraisals.
Managers give more weight to performance during the three months prior to the evaluation than to the previous nine months of the evaluation period because the recent instances dominate their memory. Also, vivid instances of an employee’s behavior (either positive or negative) will be most easily recalled from memory and will appear more numerous than commonplace incidents. These will therefore be weighted more heavily in the performance appraisals.
The availability heuristics is influenced by the ease of recall or retrievability of information of some event. Ease of recall suggests that if something is more easily recalled in your memory, you think that it must occur with a high probability.
A study by Karlsson, Loewenstein, and Ariely (2008) showed that people are more likely to purchase insurance to protect themselves after a natural disaster they have just experienced than they are to purchase insurance on this type of disaster before it happens. Their decisions are influenced by the recency of events and retrievability of the information.
What Causes More Deaths- Strokes or Accidents?
It’s a fact that strokes cause many more deaths than accidents by road or otherwise, but one study confirmed that 80% of the respondents in the study stated that accidental death is more likely the cause of death.
This is because accidental deaths are reported more often in media and present a vivid image and strong impression upon our minds as compared to death from strokes. We remember horrific accidental deaths more clearly and therefore our mind takes immediate judgement based on the recent, more vivid imagery in its records.
Availability Heuristics Misguides Us
Unfortunately, this approach distorts our understanding of the real risks. We often don’t do the proper assessment of all the alternatives in front of us and are misguided by ease of recall due to recency of events or retrievability of information in our minds.
How To Debug Your Mind from Availability Heuristics?
No doubt, we have to make quicker decisions at times, but we also don’t want such promptness that doesn’t take into account the real risks involved. The solution is to take a pause before jumping to the conclusion. Don’t let emotions or any quick rule of thumb method influence your decision-making in important matters, rather you need to gather proper data, which may take some time.
Availability heuristic supplies you with only the limited information based on your mental ability to easily recall the information depending on the nature of your experience.
But you need to go beyond the limited information and look at other relevant data by doing some more research. Only once you have the information that’s necessary for making a decision should you make the decision. At the same time, you shouldn’t be sitting over the problem indefinitely on the pretext of researching and collecting more information. Actually, whatever maximum and relevant information you can gather on the subject in the time available to you, you need to do that.
How Much Information is Sufficient to Make Decisions?
Follow 40–70 Colin Powell Rule
Use the 40–70 Colin Powell Rule when you are not sure about the adequacy of information available with you. Former U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell devised this rule about making decisions and coming to a point of action in cases where you lack information. He suggested whenever you want to make some decision on any important aspect, you should have no less than 40% and no more than 70% of the information required for that decision.
He states less than 40% of information means we are bound to make wrong decisions. But if we continue to search for more than 70% information, we will end up taking so much time that the decision itself will not deliver any meaningful results, because it’s already too late.
Therefore, don’t make decisions based on this shortcut of availability heuristic, and do your research to get requisite information before you make any decision.
Hope you liked this article!
If you liked above , you’d also want to check my other articles below:
Da Vinci’s 7 (Timeless) Principles To Think Like A Genius!
2 Types of Knowledge & 4 Steps To Acquire Real Knowledge
One Simple Advice for Lazy People to Become More Intelligent!
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