Three Ways We’re Hardwired to Believe our own Bull

And how to use the psychology behind cognitive bias to call yourself out

Unless your head has been stuck in the sand for the past 4+ years, you know there’s been something fishy going on with this little thing we like to call truth.

It seems that nearly anything today can be called into question simply by stamping it with two magical words. In my mind, however, the phrase “Fake News” has lost all meaning, given the recklessness and situational convenience with which it is invoked every day.

Political mudslinging aside, we all fall victim to self-deception. It is in our very nature to advocate for and stubbornly cling to beliefs about things we cannot possibly know. This can lead to some dire consequences in business and personal endeavors.

For example, for a great many years, our understanding of economics itself hinged on a belief that human beings are rational actors who make decisions in their own best self-interest.

That was until economists faced the powerful one-two punch of psychologists Amos Tversky and Nobel Prize Winner Daniel Kahneman, who exposed the influence cognitive bias exerts over human decision making.

As Kahneman put it in his thought-altering work “Thinking, Fast and Slow,” there is “a puzzling limitation of our mind: our excessive confidence in what we believe we know, and our apparent inability to acknowledge the full extent of our ignorance and the uncertainty of the world we live in. We are prone to overestimate how much we understand the world and to underestimate the role of changes in events.”

With that in mind, I’ve outlined three primary ways we trick ourselves into believing our own BS in the hopes that by working together, we can start to call ourselves out, become better colleagues and maybe begin to restore some meaning to the truth.

BS Enabler #1: Confabulation

We make up explanations for things we don’t understand.

Think about the last time you were in an argument — possibly with a cantankerous colleague or a defiant direct report — and you were a little out of your depth. Did you perhaps make up a plausible explanation on the spot to validate your belief?

“An acquaintance once confessed to me that when his spouse contradicts a theory he’s just hatched, he begins spontaneously generating ‘facts’ to support it — even when he realizes that she is right and he is wrong,” writes Kathryn Schulz in “Being Wrong.” “In cases like these, we actually do know the limits of our knowledge, we just can’t stop ourselves from barreling right past them. As with our individual and collective difficulty with saying ‘I was wrong,’ we aren’t very good at saying, ‘I don’t know.’”

You might not even know you’re doing it or possibly you chuckled to yourself afterward, silently acknowledging how clever your off-the-cuff explanation sounded. While it’s almost a natural reflex, it can easily leads to unnecessary arguments over trivial details, breeding distrust and resentment.

“People who work with clinical confabulators report that the most striking thing about them isn’t the strangeness of their erroneous beliefs, not even the weirdness of the confabulations they generate to cover them, but rather the fact that these confabulations are uttered as if they were God’s word.”

Surprisingly, it gets even stranger from there. In the 1960s, neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga conducted experiments on patients following “split-brain” procedures that severed their corpus callosum, separating the brain’s two hemispheres in an attempt to treat severe epilepsy. When a patient was given visual instructions in a field of view that could not be consciously acknowledged, the patients would perform the action but completely fabricate reasons for their behavior.

BS Enabler #2: Mistaken Memories

We are often unshakably certain of our past yet wildly inaccurate in our recollection.

If I were to ask you where you were and what you were doing at the exact moment planes struck the World Trade Center the morning of September 11, 2001, I bet you could immediately conjure a vivid snapshot of the experience, recalling minute details of your surroundings and what you had been doing.

Unfortunately (and perhaps surprisingly) for you, your recollection is likely wrong. Psychologist Ulrich Neisser recorded his students’ memories the day after the 1986 explosion of the Challenger space shuttle and compared them to their memories three years later. Only 7% of second reports matched initial reports, 50% got two-thirds of their memories wrong and 25% were wrong in every detail. The results have since been replicated in relation to 9/11.

“None of us capture our memories in perfect, strobe-like detail, but almost all of us believe in them with blinding conviction,” writes Schulz. “This conviction is most pronounced with respect to flashbulb memories, but it isn’t limited to them. Even with comparatively trivial matters, we believe in our recollections with touching sincerity and defend them with astounding tenacity.”

If we can all be guilty of memory lapses related to a monumental act of terrorism, how confident does that make you in your recollection of what your coworker said in that meeting two months ago? What about the night you got engaged?

BS Enabler 3#: Confirmation Bias

We seek out evidence to confirm our existing beliefs.

Confirmation bias is sometimes discussed in the business world. It is very insidious and can sneak into judgements and decisions in any part of our lives, leading to the automatic dismissal of conflicting evidence and POVs.

“Contrary to the rules of philosophers of science, who advise testing hypotheses by trying to refute them, people (and scientists, quite often) seek data that are likely to be compatible with the beliefs they currently hold,” writes Kahneman. “The confirmatory bias…favors uncritical acceptance of suggestions and exaggeration of the likelihood of extreme and improbable events.”

If you’re a manager, you’re likely asked to judge the performance of others and collaborate across different groups and functional areas of expertise. Confirmation bias can lead a manager to search exclusively for evidence of their initial, often snap judgement about a team member’s willingness to collaborate, work ethic, performance level and more.

Not only does this enable us to frame dissenting team members’ opinions as defiant and confrontational, it also results in our rendering of a verdict before allowing the employee to share their point of view.

How to Clean Up the BS and Build Stronger Teams

Now that we know how shaky and slanted our memories often are — what can we do to prevent our minds from tricking us and doing permanent damage to our professional careers and personal relationships?

Tap devil’s advocates and encourage a diversity of opinion: Different points of view are critical to developing the best ideas. Respectful debate should be encouraged, not framed as combative or counterproductive. Devil’s advocates will also keep you in check if you start down the path of confabulation.

Hit the brakes: We are all moving a million miles an hour. Be mindful of when you move a little too fast. When your answers become reflexive and automatic, the odds are that you’re making a few things up. If you need to make a major decision, don’t just phone it in because you’re multitasking.

Listen to your employees: It can be tempting to “remember” what a colleague said in a previous meeting and assume you know what they’re thinking. First, your memory may be slanted in favor of what you want to hear. Second, taking the time to listen will validate that their perspective is valued and help to build a stronger relationship, one of mutual respect.

Don’t punish being wrong: Celebrate the spectacular failures of employees who are willing to go out on a limb, be vulnerable and take a risk in favor of innovation. One cannot learn and grow into something better unless they have failed. If you can remove shames attachment to failure in your organization, your team will have the comfort and security to do work that is truly innovative.

Drop a line about your experiences with cognitive bias and let me know if there’s a topic you’d like me to explore in my next piece.

###