3 Ways Confirmation Bias Can Affect Team Performance
Research shows that accessing information on social media can keep us in echo chambers. And it’s easier than ever to bring that sort of bias to work with you – unless you actively work on challenging your viewpoints. Confirmation bias, for example, can affect team performance.
“Confirmation bias is the human tendency to look for information that confirms a person’s pre-existing views. Those with confirmation bias will often reject observations to the contrary, which is particularly harmful in a working environment,” says Max Wesman, COO at GoodHire.
“Confirmation bias can make people less likely to engage with information which challenges their views,” says Desirée Silverstone, a psychotherapist turned executive coach who offers neuroscience workshops for Fortune 500 companies. “This can lead us to limit other options, make poor decisions, and it can also negatively impact relationships.”
Here are three ways confirmation bias can seep its way into your team – and how to counteract its negative effects.
1. It can lower morale
Confirmation bias can turn water cooler gossip into a negative spiral. “If someone dislikes or is irritated with someone at work, they tend to point out the qualities about that individual that annoy them,” according to Silverstone. “There is a tendency for people to be sensitive to negative information, so it is natural for them to look out for behaviors that confirm what they have been told to confirm their viewpoints. As emotions are contagious, this can impact the morale of the team.”
Another way confirmation bias can affect morale is during performance reviews. Believe it or not, 96% of employees (yes, a nearly unanimous number), feel that management bias affects performance reviews, according to a 2019 Brandon Hall Group study.
The solutions:
If you overhear negative comments about a coworker, call confirmation bias out before it spreads. “It’s important to be aware of confirmation bias so that we may identify it in real-time. Whether displayed by yourself or a team member, knowing how and when to call it out can prevent it from harming the decision-making process or causing business-critical errors,” says Wesman.
Managers should also be aware of their biases before conducting performance reviews. Putting mechanisms in place for continuous feedback and coaching can also help, as it can provide a more holistic view of someone’s performance and work approach.
2. It leads to non-inclusive hiring practices
Being aware of confirmation bias is critical during the recruiting and hiring process. If you’re not careful, you can end up impacting your culture negatively by only hiring people who think like you.
“Generally, we prefer people who are similar to us because it makes us feel comfortable. There is a tendency for people like us to have similar viewpoints to our own,” according to Silverstone. But this holds your team back in several ways. “It has been proven that the same kind of thinking that leads to limited decision making can have a negative impact on the ability to innovate and achieve desired outcomes. According to research, it adversely affects a company’s bottom line in the long run,” she adds.
The solutions:
Silverstone recommends making a concerted effort to hire people with different backgrounds so that diverse perspectives can be brought to the table. “There is no doubt that diversity in the workplace not only improves performance but also improves morale,” she says.
3. It hurts you strategically
According to Wesman, confirmation bias is fairly common in organizations with top-down hierarchies – and this phenomenon can hurt you strategically. “If the CEO wants to go live with a new product or service, rounds of market research might be delegated to the product development team under the guise of evaluating the initiative’s feasibility,” he says. As a result, teams conduct their research looking for positive signals in an effort to please their boss.
This can show up in the form of loaded market research survey questions and biased data analysis. In other words, teams find the data they need to support the CEO’s initial vision, but there is no solid or conclusive evidence that it’s a strategically sound idea. “Moving forward may seem like a foregone conclusion, but in reality, no proper research was carried out to determine market viability or demand,” adds Wesman .
The solutions:
Remove biases from the questions asked in your market research. Don’t give participants indications of your expectations. For example, rather than asking “How much would this product improve your life?”, allow participants to rank product features by priority or evaluate each one of them with a numeric scale. “This removes preconceptions from the equation entirely, which provides you with a much better read on market sentiment,” says Wesman.
Focus on a core principle. Make decisions based on facts and evidence. Bring in different viewpoints to help extract facts from subjective sentiment, and build a culture where debating because you value getting closer to the truth is encouraged. “Ensure that alternative viewpoints are considered, especially those that differ from your own. Create a culture where dissent is encouraged in the workplace,” says Silverstone.
