Why we do what we do: Living in the fishbowl — Expectation Bias

Personalization · By On · 2 Comments

In my quest to tackle the major biases that plague our indus­try, the sec­ond one I want to tackle is Expec­ta­tion Bias or “the ten­dency for exper­i­ments to believe, cer­tify, and pub­lish data that agree with their expec­ta­tions for the out­come of an exper­i­ment, and to dis­be­lieve, dis­card, or down­grade the cor­re­spond­ing weight­ings for the data that appear to con­flict with those expec­ta­tions”.

In sta­tis­tics and math, you deal with the con­cept of expected out­come. You take the pay­out, fac­tor in the per­cent chance of it hap­pen­ing, and then fac­tor in the num­ber of chances you are tak­ing to reach there. This is the exact rea­son that the lot­tery is such a bad invest­ment, because it has a mas­sive out­come, but such a low like­li­hood of reach­ing that con­clu­sion that your expected pay­out is never going to hap­pen (Neglect of prob­a­bil­ity bias). Just because one per­son did win the lot­tery does not mean that most peo­ple win the lot­tery. The same is true for just read­ing the sto­ries or copy­ing oth­ers. There is a want to push out and tell peo­ple about how advanced you are, as well as the want to see imme­di­ate pay­offs (hyper­bolic dis­count­ing). There is also the need to dis­tin­guish your­self or your offer­ing and to dis­count oth­ers if an action only works 1 out of 20 times, and even then you don’t know if it is the best out­come even for that group, what pos­si­ble good is it going to do you?

Obvi­ously, the prob­lem then becomes know­ing the like­li­hood and the rel­a­tive value of the outcome…

Good luck get­ting that infor­ma­tion if you don’t have direct inter­ac­tion. Not only are peo­ple hes­i­tant to share if they know, but peo­ple are inher­ently wired to not seek or know that infor­ma­tion them­selves (choice sup­port­ive bias). What does hap­pen how­ever is a giant group of ankle biters… peo­ple or groups (espe­cially agen­cies or “experts”) who promise that they have all the answers, who tell you that if you lis­ten to them, every­thing will be golden, and that all of their clients are super suc­cess­ful. It is not evil, it is not even that they know what they are act­ing self­ishly, they are just wired to think in these terms, as any human is to want to believe them. This phe­nom­e­non and the play of it on the human psy­che is a recur­ring theme and one that leads to very inef­fi­cient and under per­form­ing pro­grams, where peo­ple are left either defend­ing poor results or seek­ing yet another magic answer to all their problems.

Suc­cess­ful con­sult­ing and suc­cess­ful pro­grams focus on the dis­ci­plines of suc­cess, not just the actions. They talk about both good and bad out­comes, and how to get more of one and less of the other. They focuses on what defines suc­cess­ful actions and alter­na­tives, not just what you are doing or a sin­gle pos­si­ble alter­na­tive. Chal­lenge any­one or any­thing that only talks about “suc­cess sto­ries” or who can’t talk about how often things work and how that com­pares to alter­na­tive processes. There exists a feed­back loop where bad prac­tices are shared and cham­pi­oned just because they are being acted on, and not because they are valu­able. It allows them to tell sto­ries that show that they got some­one to do… some­thing. It is up to you to stop your path down that mobius strip, and instead chal­lenge your­self and oth­ers to think dif­fer­ently and to think in terms of find­ing a bet­ter way and a bet­ter answer. Pro­grams have to be able to learn, grow, adapt and deal with real world prob­lems, which means that any sin­gle “answer” is just play­ing to your hubris and leav­ing you open to future failure.

One of my favorite say­ings is “Infor­ma­tion is not knowl­edge”. Seek­ing out bet­ter infor­ma­tion and chal­leng­ing the sto­ries and prac­tices of oth­ers, chal­leng­ing your self to learn and grow and change your biases and your want to be “right” is the only way for your pro­gram to truly move for­ward. Focus on the sys­tem, focus on learn­ing, focus on fix­ing why you do what you do, and never stop, never let go, and never let your­self fall for these traps. That is how you succeed.

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  • http://www.xzgbzj.com 文秘之家

    好文章,转啦

  • http://management.curiouscatblog.net/ John Hunter

    Focus on learn­ing, make that the pri­mary objec­tive. It is good to con­firm what you believe, but it doesn’t help tremen­dously. Instead you should be excited when things con­tra­dict what you believe. This gives you the chance to learn. This doesn’t mean being con­fused and unclear. It doesn’t aid learn­ing to accept crazy ideas with lit­tle evi­dence when you have a huge pile of evi­dence say­ing the opposite.

    But those that con­tinue to learn through­out their life are able to accept and revel in new and con­tra­dic­tory ideas. And to seek out new areas that they are igno­rant of.

    I find those that believe in sim­ple, clear answers are inter­est­ing in hid­ing from the chal­lenge of deal­ing with the mess of com­plex issues that impact us every­day. You can sur­vive per­fectly fine ignor­ing much of what is hap­pen­ing and hold­ing to overly sim­ple ideas that look good on a power point slide. But you often are greatly lim­it­ing what you could understand.