 "Invisible bias")
We commonly see ourselves as accurate and rational evaluators of others and their actions. But, as the studies on the correspondence bias show, the way information is presented to us greatly influences our evaluations of others and our decisions. In addition to the correspondence bias, there are two other common evaluation mistakes I want to tell you about. The first has to do with how we use information about a persons actions, even when such information is irrelevant.
If you are a fan of the hit TV comedy Seinfeld, you may remember an episode in which Jerrys friend George leaves his car parked at work on purpose. George wants his boss, New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner, to believe that he is putting in long hours. George hopes that his apparent productivity will impress his boss and net him a raise. Researchers would call Georges behavior an attempt to invoke the input bias the tendency to use signs of effort (in this case, the presence of Georges car in the parking lot) to judge outcomes (how hard George works) when this information may be irrelevant and uninformative. Because of the input bias, we tend to automatically associate a high degree of effort or expense with a high-quality outcome.
Beyond TV shows, people often purposefully manipulate input measures such as effort (and even the perception of input measures) to influence their assessments of outcomes. This desire to manage impressions can even influence the way companies are structured. For example, the National Bicycle Industrial Company manufactures and delivers custom-ordered bicycles three weeks after receiving an order, even though it takes the firm less than three hours to manufacture and assemble a bicycle. The company could invest resources in speedy delivery without too much trouble, but it believes that consumers may not appropriately value faster delivery. Slow delivery time, the reasoning goes, may give customers the sense that their customized product, which purportedly took a long time to build, has greater value than a bike that seems to have been rushed off the assembly line.
Karen Chinander (a professor at Florida Atlantic University) and Maurice Schweitzer tested this very possibility in a cleverly designed laboratory experiment. They began with a pilot study in which they had a participant prepare and deliver a seven-and-a-half-minute presentation about electronic ink; the researchers recorded the presentation for use in their main study. For the main study, sixty-three college students were asked to view the presentation and then answer a few questions about its quality. After viewing the presentation but before formally assessing its quality, participants received information about the amount of time the person had spent preparing his presentation. Half of the participants were told that the preparation time was long: eight hours and thirty-four minutes (high-input condition). The other half were told that the preparation time was short: thirty-seven minutes (low-input condition). After receiving this information, participants in both conditions rated the quality of the presentation along various dimensions, such as the quality of the information and its organisation. Participants also indicated whether the information about preparation time influenced their assessment of the quality of the presentation and if they believed that the amount of preparation time should influence their ratings.
The results were in line with the predicted outcome of Georges strategy in the Seinfeld episode: participants rated the presentation to be of greater quality when preparation time was long rather than short. Even those participants who believed that preparation time should not influence their ratings (65 percent of them) and those who believed preparation time did not influence their ratings (67 percent of them) showed the same pattern of results.
The input bias also skews our evaluations outside the domain of judging others effort and decision quality. In follow-up experiments, Chinander and Schweitzer had participants taste chocolate and tea that they were told had been produced by either expensive or inexpensive machinery. Individuals preferred the chocolate and tea that they thought was produced using expensive methods though the same products were used throughout the experiment.
These results illustrating the input bias may not seem surprising to you. Its only common sense, you might reason, that the more effort we devote to a task (the input), the more likely we will be to reach a given performance goal (the outcome). Similarly, R&D expenditures are often used as a measure of the innovativeness of a firm (another outcome). Yet in many situations, effort does not reflect the quality of the outcome. For instance, the fact that I spent an endless number of hours working on this book may tell you little about its quality. Similarly, learning that your car was at the shop for a long time to get an oil change probably tells you little about the quality of the service you received on it.
It is often difficult to know how loosely or tightly correlated information about someones effort is with that persons intended results. Even if we understand this observation intuitively, as most of the participants in Chinander and Schweitzers experiments did, our judgments continue to be swayed by impressive inputs. Moreover, as both the Seinfeld storyline and the results of these experiments suggest, we frequently make decisions based on biased or manipulated information about effort. As Schweitzer once noted when talking about his research, Theres this billboard for Lexus that says something like, 35,000 people took vacations in the south of France last year; none of them was a Lexus engineer. I dont really care that they went on vacation. Is it a good car? Thats what I care about. People can misperceive what these inputs are measuring.
SIDETRACKED: WHY OUR DECISIONS GET DERAILED
AUTHOR: Francesca Gino
PUBLISHER: Harvard Business Review Press
PRICE: Rs 995
ISBN: 9781422142691.
Reprinted by permission of Harvard Business Review Press. Excerpted from Sidetracked: Why Our Decisions Get Derailed, and How we Can Stick to the Plan. Copyright 2013 Francesca Gino. All rights reserved.
If you are a fan of the hit TV comedy Seinfeld, you may remember an episode in which Jerrys friend George leaves his car parked at work on purpose. George wants his boss, New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner, to believe that he is putting in long hours. George hopes that his apparent productivity will impress his boss and net him a raise. Researchers would call Georges behavior an attempt to invoke the input bias the tendency to use signs of effort (in this case, the presence of Georges car in the parking lot) to judge outcomes (how hard George works) when this information may be irrelevant and uninformative. Because of the input bias, we tend to automatically associate a high degree of effort or expense with a high-quality outcome.
Beyond TV shows, people often purposefully manipulate input measures such as effort (and even the perception of input measures) to influence their assessments of outcomes. This desire to manage impressions can even influence the way companies are structured. For example, the National Bicycle Industrial Company manufactures and delivers custom-ordered bicycles three weeks after receiving an order, even though it takes the firm less than three hours to manufacture and assemble a bicycle. The company could invest resources in speedy delivery without too much trouble, but it believes that consumers may not appropriately value faster delivery. Slow delivery time, the reasoning goes, may give customers the sense that their customized product, which purportedly took a long time to build, has greater value than a bike that seems to have been rushed off the assembly line.
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The results were in line with the predicted outcome of Georges strategy in the Seinfeld episode: participants rated the presentation to be of greater quality when preparation time was long rather than short. Even those participants who believed that preparation time should not influence their ratings (65 percent of them) and those who believed preparation time did not influence their ratings (67 percent of them) showed the same pattern of results.
The input bias also skews our evaluations outside the domain of judging others effort and decision quality. In follow-up experiments, Chinander and Schweitzer had participants taste chocolate and tea that they were told had been produced by either expensive or inexpensive machinery. Individuals preferred the chocolate and tea that they thought was produced using expensive methods though the same products were used throughout the experiment.
| Meet the author Francesca Gino is an associate professor of business administration in the Negotiations, Organisations & Markets Unit at Harvard Business School. She teaches negotiation and also co-teaches a PhD course on decision-making and ethics. Her research focuses on judgment and decision-making, negotiation, ethics, social influence and creativity. Gino has earned major research awards from the US National Science Foundation and the Academy of Management. She also advises firms and not-for-profit organisations in the areas of negotiation, decision-making, and organisational behaviour. Gino taught at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Kenan-Flagler Business School and at the Tepper School of Business, Carnegie Mellon University. Gino holds a Ph.D. in Economics and Management from the Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies, Pisa. |
These results illustrating the input bias may not seem surprising to you. Its only common sense, you might reason, that the more effort we devote to a task (the input), the more likely we will be to reach a given performance goal (the outcome). Similarly, R&D expenditures are often used as a measure of the innovativeness of a firm (another outcome). Yet in many situations, effort does not reflect the quality of the outcome. For instance, the fact that I spent an endless number of hours working on this book may tell you little about its quality. Similarly, learning that your car was at the shop for a long time to get an oil change probably tells you little about the quality of the service you received on it.
It is often difficult to know how loosely or tightly correlated information about someones effort is with that persons intended results. Even if we understand this observation intuitively, as most of the participants in Chinander and Schweitzers experiments did, our judgments continue to be swayed by impressive inputs. Moreover, as both the Seinfeld storyline and the results of these experiments suggest, we frequently make decisions based on biased or manipulated information about effort. As Schweitzer once noted when talking about his research, Theres this billboard for Lexus that says something like, 35,000 people took vacations in the south of France last year; none of them was a Lexus engineer. I dont really care that they went on vacation. Is it a good car? Thats what I care about. People can misperceive what these inputs are measuring.
SIDETRACKED: WHY OUR DECISIONS GET DERAILED
AUTHOR: Francesca Gino
PUBLISHER: Harvard Business Review Press
PRICE: Rs 995
ISBN: 9781422142691.
Reprinted by permission of Harvard Business Review Press. Excerpted from Sidetracked: Why Our Decisions Get Derailed, and How we Can Stick to the Plan. Copyright 2013 Francesca Gino. All rights reserved.