Business

HR Matters: Cognitive biases to bear in mind over the festive season

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IN work, HR people are often on the lookout for cognitive biases. There are loads of these (mostly) subconscious routines working in our heads as we process information, influencing us in one direction or another without us realising. We can help staff recognise these and try to ensure they don’t have a negative effect on anything important.

But these don’t only operate in work, and with the festive season here it might be worthwhile considering how some of these can play into your holiday time.

Do any of the following seem familiar?

Ever groaned inwardly as the board games come off the shelf, or charades start to get warmed up just as you are settling down for a snooze by the fire? Maybe inspired by the old phrase ‘the devil makes work for idle hands’, people naturally feel compelled to act, to do something, do anything rather than remain inert. That’s known as ‘action bias’.

Maybe you’ve gotten into an argument where the person you are trying to be rational with is coming off with the greatest load of misinformed waffle and bluster? They are totally convinced they are right and yet unfortunately are just too intellectually challenged to understand how wrong they really are. That’s the ‘Dunning-Kruger Effect’.

Find yourself looking to buy a gift online and you use the first one you see as the benchmark to judge all the others, regardless of how intrinsically good, bad, cheap or dear it is? That’s known as ‘anchoring’.

Started working on a 3000-piece jigsaw and by day two you are totally bored with it, but keep going because a third of it is already completed? Maybe you realise half-way through a book that it’s a bit rubbish, but you finish it out anyway? That’s ‘sunk cost bias’; where we don’t want our time and effort wasted, so we persevere regardless.

Been caught up in the craic, atmosphere and enjoyment of a big family reunion and you agree to go to watch one of your nephews or nieces in a nativity play? You get to the day in question and realise you would sooner chew your own arm off than sit through two hours of this? You’ve been caught out by the ‘affect heuristic’, where your emotions at the time have overridden your normal logical, fact-based decision-making process.

Ever had more than your fair share in the pub and made a fool of yourself? Next morning you put that down to tiredness because you worked late, or maybe people buying you too many drinks. Conversely have you watched someone do the same and you attribute that to them being lightweight and unable to hold their beer? That’s the ‘actor-observer’ bias where we tend to attribute failings of our own to external (and out of our control) reasons and failure in others to internal causes

Been at a family function and you meet someone’s new partner who you bore to tears with your love of football or musicals because everyone in your family and all their partners love football (or musicals)? That could be the ‘false consensus effect’ where you are surrounded by likeminded people so often that you think everyone else thinks like you all do and agrees with all your values, likes and behaviours.

And finally, if you are stressed out because you think you are way behind on your Christmas preparation, don’t beat yourself up too much. The ‘Zeigarnik effect’ means we tend to remember incomplete tasks much more than completed ones, so you may well be further along than you realise.

Even as a little experiment it can be worthwhile considering if we have ever fallen victim to any of these and maybe take a step back and re-evaluate our decisions, choices or actions once in a while, with a little more insight into why we do what we do.

Anyhow, thanks for reading in 2021, have a great holiday break and see you in 2022 !

Barry Shannon is head of HR at STATSports