Mindware Engineering
How Cognitive Biases Ruin Your Brilliant Idea
Psychological effects you must know
Imagine that you want to introduce a new idea to your team. You learnt a new methodology, or you want to make changes in a team’s process. Maybe you read a book about Domain-Driven Design, or it was Clean Architecture, or you have been at a meetup. And this new thing is so cool. But you don’t get any support.
Why? What is next?
You can be wrong.
To begin with, you can be wrong, deal with it. Being “right” is relative, especially in the real world. Uncertainty is a common situation for us. We have to live surrounded by stochastic or chaotic systems with non-linear behavior. We are fooled by randomness and make mistakes about probability.
The brain is not so powerful a tool as we can think.
Our conscious is miserable, it can perform just 1 task in a time, it operates with 5–7 things at working memory, and we have thoughts only by 3 seconds duration. We suffer from the cognitive load. And our personality exists just because of the processes in our brain. Personality can be considered as an epiphenomenon.
Half of our day we spend in a mind-wandering. All significant decisions are made without our consciousness.
It seems that the default mode network (DMN) is responsible for all complex decisions we make. One of the theories says that DMN exists to think about other people, and it developed for social communications. The number of objects in this network can be matched with Dunbar’s number. We can have stable social relationships with 150 people if round up.
Our subconscious can work only with 150 complex mind-objects on average. And if you think, 150 is not a large number. Just imagine the amount of different complex concepts in any field: software engineering, data science, mathematics, or medicine.
You can change your mind.
You were right, and an idea is worth it. But you can change your mind. You can demonstrate conformity. It is always easier to agree with the opinion of the group than to argue with it.
You could not convince your team for changes but still believe in your idea. You start to have cognitive dissonance, a feeling of mental discomfort from holding two conflicting attitudes. You want to get rid of this feeling, and this is fine. It is a defense mechanism, an unconscious process to protect you from anxious thoughts.
You begin to think about your rejected idea that it is not so good, and about the default status that it is not that bad. Then you will start to think that the default is even better. This is a choice-supportive bias.
Even if you see a negative outcome of the current decision, you will continue your behavior instead of trying to change the environment. This is an escalation of commitment. But some people can change the current status.
Why sometimes it works and sometimes not?
What can you do?
Don’t start with a whole idea.
You are right. You are sure about it. And you didn’t refuse of your idea.
Don’t start with a whole complex idea at once. When a group of people doesn’t understand an idea, they rather reject it. People have a tendency to choose the option that a well-known over something new. This is an ambiguity effect.
And don’t try to outargue in a straightaway. It won’t work. People will strive to avoid cognitive dissonance.
People prefer to search and interpret information that supports their current beliefs. It is confirmation bias. This effect is even stronger for desired outcomes or for the questions which are emotionally strong for us.
We are likely to notice and remember what is consistent with our current view. We ignore facts that don’t match our expectations. It is selective perception.
The difference between these two is that confirmation bias applies when we are actively looking for information, and selective perception works as a filter for existing knowledge.
There is a Dunning-Kruger effect when people with low competence overestimate their abilities, and people with high competence think that they are not so good.
But you can be wrong about other people’s skills. Because of the fundamental attribution error, we tend to explain our failures by the surrounding environment and circumstances and failures of other people with their bad abilities.
Reconsider your approach.
Instead of discussing the whole complex idea try to focus on the specific problems and suggest concrete solutions. You can begin by agreeing on the purpose of the change and it is easier to convince people to do it “your way” if it shows that your way achieves an end-state we all want.
It is important to reduce the size of changes. The less granularity of changes gives the more probability to agree with them. It can relate to the foot-in-the-door technique, or you can even use door-in-the-face.
Share knowledge with a whole team. Your goal is to create enough density of a new knowledge. Aligning and equally understanding of information leads to better chances to accept it.
Also, consider that our brain needs time to agree with the arguments and make a decision. Remember that our thinking process has limits. So don’t push too much. Instead, continually share portioned pieces of information.
At least, effect of availability cascade can work. People adopt the new insight because other people within a team have adopted it.
Final thoughts
Quality means doing it right when no one is looking. Henry Ford
There are dozens of cognitive biases. To recap these constraints of our decision process.
- Be aware of our brain limits. For example, you cannot get rid of confirmation bias entirely, but you can lower it effect by training your critical thinking.
- It is better to lead changes than dictate them.
- Start small and iterate, be agile.
- Educate yourself and share your knowledge with a team. You can learn a lot when trying to explain something to your colleagues.
- Listen more, ask more, talk last.
Thank you for reading! Share you thoughts with me on LinkedIn and Twitter.
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Originally published at https://pavelfokin.dev.
