How Biased are you towards biases?
Biases and heuristics are part and parcel of our day to day life and inadvertently we end up making a biased opinion or a decision in one way or the other. Especially if we are part of a corporate setup and we interact with people and processes on a day to day basis. Heuristics and biases are not always the antagonist in a story, on most of the occasions, if you are fully aware of them, you can make complete use of them to make informed decisions. But eventually, we are biased towards these biases and end up biasing the decisions based on our preference towards these biases unknowingly.
Recency bias, associating and deciding everything upon the most recent events. This bias kicks in every time we fill our review about our teammates as part of the 360-degree review or project review process. Irrespective of how the project rolled on during its entire course of time, the recent events that happened close to the delivery date or the events that happened right before we fill in the review into the rating system, decides the overall performance of the team member. This is the main reason why companies are now moving towards period check-in system so that the feedback can be exchanged as and when it happens and not wait until the end of the project. But the most amazing thing about the recency bias is it will always give us a clouded view, so in certain scenarios where you started on a wrong foot, this kind of bias would help us as well as others to trust our future work in the coming days, provided they are biased towards the recency bias even at that time.
If our preference is towards the recency bias, then we are ignoring the accepts of representativeness heuristics to an extent as well. Detailed and Expected associations would go for a toss If we are biased towards recency bias, which is good in one way or the other. The detailed association is the tendency to judger membership in a group by how well an instance matches a prototype of the group. The expected association is judging something by its similarity to the representative condition, especially when an event is a representative of other events. Trusting that Dhoni would take us home every time he bats till the last over is a form of positive expected association whereas branding someone as potential latecomer is a form of negative expected association. We tend to be biased towards this negative expected association, as we have always been taught to take a cautious step towards stranger things. Recall all those instances, where based on the output of the first ever task we assigned it to them, we started predicting all of their other outputs to be in a similar shape and started planning for the anomalies as well. In common language, we are just acting as a judge, but you are biasing your working relationship based on expected association. Sometimes this helps us in weeding out the people not suitable for a particular job at an early stage and avoid all the losses associated with it, but this is possible only if our evaluation process is foolproof. A not so efficient evaluation process would lead to a negative outcome based on expected association. Evaluation processes play an important role when it comes to how we make use of these biases, even during the recruitment process our preference towards a particular college or us associating a candidate with one of our current colleagues, all of these are instances of experiencing the effects of detailed association. Even the new age technologically advanced companies are trying their best to overcomes and overhaul their recruitment process so that it can free of biases. We are not alone in this fight against biases and heuristics, but the first process in making sure whether we are using it in the right way is by being aware of all these biases and heuristics. This is like our belief towards the whole democratic election process, we can easily assume all the candidates to be of a particular type and prefer the NOTA option. But the right amount of effort and time would help us to evaluate the candidates in the fray and in turn we would end up taking an informed decision. Biases and heuristics also work in a similar way, we can assume we are unbiased by default and continue to do everything in the same way, but in a way, this assumption itself shows how self-biased we are. We all are biased towards everything and in reality, we are biased towards these biases and heuristics as well.
