After scrolling through “Principles of Management”, distributed by University of Minnesota Libraries under a Creative Commons license, I focused on how biases can influence decision making in a negative way. This section elaborates on common biases that people fall into: hindsight bias, overconfidence bias, anchoring, and framing bias. I had recently been trained to spot some of these biases through online training offered by LinkedIn.
Reflecting on my own experiences and past decisions, I still sometimes fall into these common traps, despite my subconscious awareness of them. When considering them all, I most often play into hindsight bias. This kind of bias “occurs when looking backward in time where mistakes made seem obvious after they have already occurred.” Basically, believing one knew that something would happen after being presented the realities of the situation. I regularly find myself being judgmental of other people’s decisions, especially when they ask me for advice. The reality of the situation is, I– and they– have no way of considering every single detail in the situation. I can only take the miniscule amount of information I am aware of and apply my past experiences to it– which are remotely similar situations at best. Thinking that I “saw it coming” is an inaccurate statement, because every single day I am honestly surprised by the decisions people make. At a larger scale, this reading forced me to consider how much of decision making is actually logical and how much is fueled by emotions. I believe that there is no true way to separate the two. Honestly, I’m not sure if we should make it a goal to make decisions in a fully logical fashion. To ignore feelings strips humanity out of our decisions. That would simply toss out any consideration we have for the feelings of others. It’s not always a bad thing to keep people in mind. Taking it all in, I would like to be more conscious of how these biases affect my decisions while remaining true to myself.

Publisher. (2015). Principles of management. University of Minnesota Libraries Publishing edition, 2015. This edition adapted from a work originally produced in 2010 by a publisher who has requested that it not receive attribution. https://doi.org/10.24926/8668.1801