• Part 1: Confirmation Bias
• Part 2: Availability heuristic
• Part 3: Fundamental attribution error
• Part 4: Selection bias
• Part 5: Anchoring

I wrote this series from the perspective of a librarian and looking at how people understand information. I hope that non-librarians also find it to be of interest. If you’re doing anything in life beyond digging ditches, you’re probably working with information constantly so it is worth your while to think through how you think.

Related posts:

1. The Librarian Guide to Cognitive Bias: Selection Bias
2. The Librarian Guide to Cognitive Bias: Fundamental Attribution Error
3. The Librarian Guide to Cognitive Bias: Confirmation Bias

I first encountered the idea of anchoring in my reading of economics, especially that exciting sub-field that combines psychology and economics (sometimes called behavioural economics). Anchoring can be defined as just getting fixated on a single idea, even if other options are better for you. As with other important cognitive biases, it was first thought up by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky several decades ago but it is one of those ideas that takes some time to understand. It stikes me as similar to the halo effect; the bias where if you think positively about a person in general, you’ll tend to view all aspects of that person positively even if it is not warranted. Anchoring, like the other cognitive biases discussed in this series, is all about taking shortcuts and trying to save thinking time. Unlike the other biases discussed though, anchoring most likely leads to problems; I struggle to see any benefit from allowing anchoring to happen. If you think that anchoring can be truly worthwhile, then I’d welcome you to comment and share your view.

The Research on Anchoring

Happily, there are plenty of studies concerning anchoring covering everything from information behaviour, to real estate to business. In a 2007 article, Annie Lau and Enrico Coiera found that anchoring has effects in searching for information; it limits what you can find. As they state in their abstract, “A person’s prior belief (anchoring) has a significant impact on their post-search answer.” Their research also confirms a bit of folk search engine wisdom; if a document or item is listed early in the search results, it is more likely to be used. I’ve actually encountered quite a few occasions where the top results have very little value. So, it pays to scan through at least a few dozen search results rather than just look at the first handful.

Anchoring also exerts an influence in the world of charities and donations. Two economists, Richard Martin and John Randal, experimented with a donation box at an art museum where admission was free. They wanted to see if different kinds of information – e.g. showing only large denomination bills in the box versus coins or small denomination notes – influenced the donation behaviour. It looks like it did. That also explains why most fundraisers suggest amounts ($50, $100 or more) and partly explains why I ignore those people standing on the street trying to raise funds. The options you present to people have an anchoring effect to encourage people to choose an option that is listed. It reminds me of the fact that some coffee shops provide small coffees but don’t list it on the menu, you can only get it by request. I may be taking some liberties with the research but I think it all makes sense.

Set sail and overcome anchoring

Overcoming anchoring and setting sail into better thinking (ha, I’m enjoying the nautical metaphors too much clearly) is a tricky since anchoring can be quite subtle. Here are some strategies that could help you overcome this cognitive bias and think better.

• Ask for other options: You’re give three options and none of them appeal to you; ask for some other options.
• Deconstruct it!: Think about the case of donations to the art museum above; how is your thinking and approach being shaped? Do you accept how it is being shaped?
• Anchor yourself: Ramit Sehti, the personal finance/entrepreneurship author, is a big fan of using psychology to constrain yourself and make better choices. Can you find a way to use anchoring to make better decisions? Maybe change your default search engine for a few days and see what happens?

References:

Ariely, Dan. Predictably Irrational. You can get the book and blog that really started me thinking about this whole topic.

Martin, Richard and Randal, John. How is donation behaviour affected by the donations of others?. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 2008

Lau, Annie YS and Coiera, Enrico W. “Do People Experience Cognitive Biases while Searching for Information?“, Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, 2007

More than two dozen great papers on cognitive biases can be read (and quite a few read for free!) on Dan Ariely’s list of academic papers.

Related posts:

1. The Librarian Guide to Cognitive Bias
2. The Librarian Guide to Cognitive Bias: Confirmation Bias
3. The Librarian Guide to Cognitive Bias: Fundamental Attribution Error

Selection bias is a very well known problem in social science research and it is something that comes up all the time. You might even say that it has become a cliche to critique an article by raising the problem of selection bias. I recall studying the problem in graduate school and finding it absolutely fascinating. It is particularly problematic when one is aiming to sample a population; for instance, if you sample the population of Canada by looking in the phone book, you will get a poor result since you will be missing quite a few people including people who use cell phones exclusively or who choose to have their phone numbers unlisted. This is where cutting corners in research and preparation can cause significant problems.

Since this problem is so well known and understood in research circles, I am not going to review the literature as I have previously. One very common problem that afflicts much psychological research is its dependence on students as participants; do you think focusing on mostly young, mostly privileged people is likely to yield substantial insights into human nature? I doubt it. Selection bias has also been identified as a problem for researchers who rely on the news media for evidence. There is also plenty of cases of this being identified as a problem in medical studies, accounting and other social policy. Even experts in statistical research can commit this error and that’s partly due to the fact that you can’t eliminate this problem with pure math. You actually need to know something about the world.

You might be skeptical about this bias and say, “Well, I don’t do any statistical analysis in my work so this doesn’t matter.” I have a bit of a love and hate relationship with statistics myself, so I see where you’re coming from. Even if you don’t produce statistical research in your work, you can’t escape from it. Do you ever read about studies and make decisions based on them? Do you ever need to know that attitude of your customers or co-workers and don’t have the resources to ask everybody? What about asking for advice? Do you only ask your friends or do you ask critics too? Then you need to understand something about the selection bias. Understanding the selection bias doesn’t guarantee perfect quality research, but it will get you a long way toward producing better decisions and help you critically make sense of statistical data.

How to cope with selection bias

In this post, I’m going to deviate from the earlier posts in the series and ask for you to comment. If you’d like to share a story about how selection bias has affected your decisions or thinking about the world, that would be interesting too. Choose any of the following and complete the sentence in a comment:

• To avoid selection bias in work, I could…

• To cope with selection bias in my research project, I plan to…

• To minimize selection bias in my personal decision making, I will…

What is the role for the librarian to cope with this kind of problem? One option might be to serve as a sounding board for a subject matter expert who is so deeply involved in a project that miss things that will be obvious to a civilian. Conducting a literature review – either full out scientific or something more modest – can be helpful. Honest writers will share how selection bias may have affected their work.

The fifth and final post in this series will explore the concept of anchoring. Come back soon to find it posted here.

Related posts:

1. The Librarian Guide to Cognitive Bias
2. The Librarian Guide to Cognitive Bias: Confirmation Bias
3. The Librarian Guide to Cognitive Bias: Anchoring

In contrast with the other cognitive biases discussed here, fundamental attribution error (FAE) is more controversial than the others. I get the impression that it is is regarded as less robust than other concepts explored in this series. However, I have seen examples of this in action often enough to consider it worthy of further exploration. This bias is also more concerned with perception and behaviour rather than information use per se. Given that librarians work with people all day though, understanding perception is important. If you need more convincing of the importance of understanding perception, then I’ll refer you to the SLA Alignment Project. Without further ado, let’s get into this error and see what can be done about it.

Explaining behaviour: the balance between personality and context

I’ve been thinking about this error for some time and have found it more difficult to explain than some of the other biases explored in this serires. Here’s the explanation I’ve come up with: fundamental attribution error occurs when you explain behaviour by personality primarily, rather than balancing it with context. Imagine you are told a story about a person who killed another person and nothing else; you might explain that by saying the person is evil. But maybe there is a context – the person was a soldier in a war – that better explains the behaviour. It is a question of focus and many people find it difficult to get the context right. As seen in the other parts of the series, fundamental attribution error saves mental effort at the expense of accuracy.

The Research on Fundamental Attribution Error

As with the availability heuristic, fundamental attribution error was discovered during psychological research in the 1970s. In a 1977 article that has been cited over two thousand times according to Google Scholar, Lee Ross found that participants in an experiment tend to overemphasize personality and character over context. It was based on an experiment where students were given pro-Castro and anti-Castro essays to read. As Wikipedia summarizes the experiment (conducted in 1967;  replicating this experiment in 2010 would require some modification):

Subjects read pro- and anti-Fidel Castro essays. Subjects were asked to rate the pro-Castro attitudes of the writers. When the subjects believed that the writers freely chose the positions they took (for or against Castro), they naturally rated the people who spoke in favor of Castro as having a more positive attitude toward Castro. However, contradicting Jones and Harris’ initial hypothesis, when the subjects were told that the writer’s positions were determined by a coin toss, they still rated writers who spoke in favor of Castro as having, on average, a more positive attitude towards Castro than those who spoke against him. In other words, the subjects were unable to see the influence of the situational constraints placed upon the writers; they could not refrain from attributing sincere belief to the writers.

The controversy on FAE is considerable however. John Sabni, Michael Siepmann and Julia Stein argue in a 2001 article that FAE, as conjectured by most social psychologists does not exist. They posit an alternative explanation that suggests that people are actually more motivated to save face or avoid embarrassment. Other psychologists have argued that encouraging students to focus on situations rather than personality may help in better understanding situations like the Jonestown. In the commercial context, I found it very interesting to see some research into the possibility that FAE may be taken into account when designing customer services. The controversy also concerns whether this phenomenon should be better termed as “correspondence bias” but I leave that particular debate to others.

As somebody who formerly worked in technical support, I can appreciate that. Some staff were tempted to label customers as incompetent, rather than considering other factors (e.g. the fact they be using a new operating system, that they are trying to do something new under stress etc). In some cases, there may have been a combination of situational pressure and lack of skill but I would apply FAE and come up with this: focus on things you can improve or adjust for the customer rather than compounding their frustration by labelling them as incapable or defective in some other way.

Practical Steps to Overcome Fundamental Attribution Error

• Avoid the evil/incompetent explanation: explaining behaviour by labelling somebody as evil or incompetent doesn’t advance things very far. You’ve insulted the person and then what do you do?
• Scan the environment: what are the constraints, rules and stresses affecting this person? Is their context different from yours? How?
• What would you do?: Imagine yourself performing the same action; why would you do it?

I don’t want to discount the importance of character and personality; that certainly matters.  I want you to consider other explanations and how ways to explain behaviour. Done well, this can help you understand people better. With any luck, it will help you be more productive in dealing with people. Does knowing about fundamental attribution error change how you approach things? For me, it helps me more calmly approach customer service phone  interactions and other bureaucratic situations.

References:

Ross, L. The intuitive psychologist and his shortcomings: Distortions in the attribution process. (1977) – I couldn’t locate a good reference link for this but it has appeared in a journal and in books.
Riggio, Heidi R and Garcia, Amber L. “The Power of Situations: Jonestown and the Fundamental Attribution Error.” Teaching of Psychology, 2009
Sabini, John; Siepmann, Michael and Julia Stein. “The Really Fundamental Attribution Error in Social Psychological Research.” Psychological Inquiry, 2001
Gebauer, Heiko; Krempl, Regine and Fleisch, Elgar. Exploring the Effect of Cognitive Biases on Customer Support Services, Creativity and Innovation Management, 2008

Related posts:

1. The Librarian Guide to Cognitive Bias
2. The Librarian Guide to Cognitive Bias: Confirmation Bias
3. The Librarian Guide to Cognitive Bias: Selection Bias

- Esgate, A. & Groome, D. (2004). An Introduction to Applied Cognitive Psychology, definition of the availability heuristic

The availability heuristic is a major concern for librarians, especially those that find they need to convince their clients, patrons or members to use their services. In order to save time, many people will simply focus on information that occurs to them rather than attempting to research something from scratch. In fact, this is a novel way to look at the idea of experience in the workplace. Experience allows you to simply remember how you approached a problem rather than going through the steps of hatching a new solution. If the problems are actually very similar or the result is not very important, then the availability heuristic may not be such a bad thing. However, most professionals are not solving the exact same problems over and over again. Unfortunately, many will still rely on their experience and habits to solve problems rather than conducting research. That is an opportunity for librarians to make a contribution; notice the information habits of your users and then figure out where routines might be changed.

The Research on the Availability Heuristic

The availability heuristic was first discussed in a 1973 article (see references) by two psychologists, Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman. Their discussion explored memory and how experiment participants performed in experiments. I found the article itself to be rather technical, but you have to start somewhere. They do raise some interesting points such as the problem of people remembering and weighting vivid events more than mundane events (e.g. the fact that your flight was delayed once for four hours rather than the dozens or hundreds of times it all went smoothly). This original article and a much more recent article in the British Medical Journal (see references) explore how this bias can undermine the quality of physician decision making. The principle can be found in other contexts, not just life or death situations, such as business and banking.

The availability heuristic is known to be a problem in business and economics research, especially when it comes to risk, the availability heuristic has been noted as a problem. Given that a through understanding of risk is vital for banking and insurance, it is important to see how this bias could affect decisions there. This article – A Cognitive Theory of the Firm – apply the concept in novel ways. Bart Nooteboom makes the argument that the availability heuristic may explain the appeal of immediate gratification over greater long term benefit; immediate gratification is more accessible. The general idea is that people will, by default, go for the option that they remember best or that seems more vivid than other options even if it is far from the best option. The bias has also been called upon to explain the subprime mortgage collapse which was a major cause of the recent recession. Steven Schwarcz in his article, “Protecting Financial Markets: Lessons from the Subprime Mortgage Meltdown,” suggests that mortgage brokers, investors and others fell victim to the availability heuristic in only looking at recent changes in housing prices (e.g. 1990-2000) rather than longer term trends showing that housing prices do not always increase.

Practical Steps to Overcome the Availability Heuristic

• Look for the Mundane Counter-Example: Are you being overly focusing on dramatic cases rather than common cases?
• Call in a librarian: Yes, that’s a bit self-serving, but it can be difficult to get perspective sometimes and how better to help you with that than a professional with research expertise?
• Ask yourself, “Why did I think of this?”: Before acting on memory, consider why it came to mind. Are you remembering something that was merely a recent example or perhaps an example that is particularly emotionally vivid? There may be nothing wrong with that but consider it.

So what do you think? How can librarians help others overcome this bias? Many people may default to Google when searching for information even if it is far from comprehensive and can be manipulated. Demonstrating how the limits of these tools and perhaps referencing the availability heuristic may help you make your case that they should use your services or help you understand your users better.

References:

Behavioural Finance, Availability Heuristic (good basic definition here and references to major articles discussing the problem)

Kahneman, Daniel and Tversky, Amos. “Availability: A heuristic for judging frequency and probability.” Cognitive Psychology (1973)

Klein, Jill G . “Five pitfalls in decisions about diagnosis and prescribing.” British Medical Journal (2005)

Nooteboom, Bart  “A Cognitive Theory of the Firm,” 2002 (a paper)

Schwarcz, Steven L. “Protecting Financial Markets: Lessons from the Subprime Mortgage Meltdown.” American Law & Economics Association Annual Meetings (2008)

Related posts:

1. The Librarian Guide to Cognitive Bias
2. The Librarian Guide to Cognitive Bias: Confirmation Bias
3. The Librarian Guide to Cognitive Bias: Fundamental Attribution Error