Biases
The Basic Idea
As the world of behavioral science continues to attract the attention of organizations in both the public and private sector, the term “bias” has become commonplace. There are a number of heuristics, biases, and fallacies that have cropped up in the media and popular science, arguably bringing the concept to buzzword status. In addition to prominence, it can also seem like there are simply too many biases to keep track of: Wikipedia’s list of cognitive biases contains nearly 200 entries. In order to prevent potential information overload, it can help to step back and take a high-level view of cognitive bias to better understand why all these bizarre effects might occur in the first place.
For starters, a bias is essentially a structured error in mental processing that leads to a conclusion that goes against formal logic or normative rationality. In other words, it is the thinking that can lead one astray; a psychological blind spot.
The confidence people have in their beliefs is not a measure of the quality of evidence but of the coherence of the story the mind has managed to construct.
– Daniel Kahneman
About the Authors
Dan Pilat
Dan is a Co-Founder and Managing Director at The Decision Lab. He is a bestselling author of Intention - a book he wrote with Wiley on the mindful application of behavioral science in organizations. Dan has a background in organizational decision making, with a BComm in Decision & Information Systems from McGill University. He has worked on enterprise-level behavioral architecture at TD Securities and BMO Capital Markets, where he advised management on the implementation of systems processing billions of dollars per week. Driven by an appetite for the latest in technology, Dan created a course on business intelligence and lectured at McGill University, and has applied behavioral science to topics such as augmented and virtual reality.
Dr. Sekoul Krastev
Dr. Sekoul Krastev is a decision scientist and Co-Founder of The Decision Lab, one of the world's leading behavioral science consultancies. His team works with large organizations—Fortune 500 companies, governments, foundations and supernationals—to apply behavioral science and decision theory for social good. He holds a PhD in neuroscience from McGill University and is currently a visiting scholar at NYU. His work has been featured in academic journals as well as in The New York Times, Forbes, and Bloomberg. He is also the author of Intention (Wiley, 2024), a bestselling book on the science of human agency. Before founding The Decision Lab, he worked at the Boston Consulting Group and Google.
