How to override unconscious bias to make better decisions

Professor Jill Klein explains the key biases that affect our judgments of others and how leaders can overcome them for more thoughtful decision-making.

Have you ever met someone and liked them straight away?

Chances are, they reminded you of yourself.

Perhaps they looked like you or maybe they supported the same football team.

That’s similarity bias in action.

We’re more inclined to like people who share something in common with us, even if we’re not aware of it.

Professor Jill Klein says while these mental shortcuts served us well 100,000 years ago on the savanna to quickly assess threats, today they undermine our leadership capabilities at work.

“Every day leaders are faced with countless decisions, and while we like to think we are in full control, unconscious biases guide our judgements in subtle, but critical ways,” Professor Klein said.

This can result in us misinterpreting human behaviour, failing to give credit when it’s due and making poor hiring decisions.

So what are the key biases at work and how can we outsmart them to make better decisions?

Similarity bias

The similarity bias can show up when we discover we have something in common with another person. It can be how we look, that we went to the same university, both grew up in a rural town or have a similar dress sense.

“It doesn't mean we dislike people who are different from us or that we don't find people from a different background incredibly interesting,” Professor Klein said.

“But all things being equal, we tend to have a preference for people who are more like us, and we often are unaware that this is having an effect on our judgments.”

Halo and horn bias

The “halo” bias occurs when a positive first impression makes us assume someone has other positive traits, often without supporting evidence.

“We tend to assume someone we like has positive traits and is competent even if we’ve only just met them. It’s not conscious, it’s automatic,” Professor Klein said.

On the flip side, if our initial impression is negative, we fall into the “horn” bias, believing someone has other correlated negative traits.

And that initial impression could come from hearsay from colleagues.

“We tend to be cognitive misers, meaning we spend as little cognitive energy as possible in making decisions unless it's really important. Then we'll devote more time.”

Confirmatory bias

One of the most powerful biases is confirmation bias, a tendency to seek information that confirms our pre-existing beliefs and desires.

“We see what we expect to see,” Professor Klein said.

“When evaluating interview candidates, for example, we’re more likely to notice things that support our gut feeling and overlook contradictory evidence.”

We’ll also often interpret ambiguous human behaviour as consistent with what we want to believe, which means we see behaviour as consistent with our prior views.

Stereotypes

Stereotypes can be a source of expectations that are then confirmed through confirmatory bias.

“We evolved to have these very efficient cognitive categories, dangerous animal versus not dangerous animal, that kept us alive,” Professor Klein said.

For this reason, stereotypes tend to be extreme.

“We ignore the fact that there's often huge variance within each group and we think the groups are more different from each other than they actually are.”

Attributions

We often make attributions, or explanations for someone’s behaviour, based on how we already feel about them.

“We can make attributions that are more generous or supportive of the person if we like them, or, we can make more unfavourable attributions if we don’t like them.” Professor Klein said.

“Perhaps a colleague is a few minutes late. If I’m already on the negative side I might interpret her lateness as indicating that she’s not as dedicated as I am to work, instead of considering factors beyond her control that could have led her to be late.”

While these attributions might feel evidence based, ultimately, they are just guesses about the other person’s behaviour.

“We're unaware of a lot of the biases that got us to a certain impression,” Professor Klein said.

Cognitive Dissonance

Cognitive dissonance is the discomfort we feel when our beliefs don’t align with our actions, or we learn that our beliefs might be incorrect.

For example, we might receive feedback that challenges our competency, and this threatens our identity.

“You see yourself as a competent, intelligent, reasonable, hardworking person and then you get feedback that contradicts that. We put up our defences to protect our identity,” Professor Klein said.

“The threatening information creates a negative emotional state that we often will repair without even realising we were experiencing the negative emotional state.”

One such defensive response is self-serving bias, where we tend to take credit for things that go well and blame others when they don’t.

“It’s a pretty human thing to do but it can lead to a lot of distortions, blaming and conflict,” Professor Klein said.

Outsmarting our biases

Biases often lock us into a mental state, but we can change course, especially if we are more aware of these hidden forces working behind the scenes.

Here are some of Professor Klein's tips to override your default biases:

1. Establish similarity

We can actively look to establish similarity by finding things we have in common with someone.

“We have way more overlap with another person than differences, so it's just a matter of finding those similarities." 

2. Search for the opposite of your initial impression

We have this initial impression, and then we'll notice things that fit with it. But we can ask ourselves, “What would show me the opposite of my initial views”?

“Who should I talk to that's most likely to tell me the opposite of what I'm thinking as opposed to just letting my bias guide me.”

3. Start with generous attributions

When someone does something we don’t like, it is easy to jump to negative attributions.

“My advice is to start with a very generous attribution,” Professor Klein said.

Not only is this generous, it’s also usually right. Most of us go about our days trying to do our best, and to be kind and helpful to others. But we make mistakes, we have pressures on us, and we have blind spots.

“We are not always our very best selves, even though we try. We should make attributions for the behaviour of others that we would hope they would make for us. So, start with a generous attribution if a co-worker turns up to a meeting late.”

4. Keep your impressions tentative early on

“Being able to acknowledge that your first impressions can be wrong is key” says Professor Klein.

“We tend to make snap judgments about other people and feel like we know much more about them than we actually do and these impressions stick with us. But we need to realise that early on, we only have a few samples of behaviour, plus a lot of our own biases and interpretations."

It’s best to keep our initial impressions tentative and update them when we know more. 

Jill teaches Managerial Judgement, Decision Making and Resilient Leadership on the MBA, Executive and Senior Executive MBA programs, Advanced Management Program, Specialist Certificate in Clinical Leadership, and a variety of executive education programs.