Whether you live on a concrete jungle or not, you are constantly making decisions. In many cases they might be so hardwired that you don’t even think about them. Your brain just push you through it without even reasoning. What we call “experience” can play an important role here: specifically, against an optimal outcome on decision-making; especially when the “experience” does not make room for considering the data.

The fundamental role of a Data Scientist is to support decision-making based on data. For that to be accomplished a data-driven culture has to be nurtured and that status quo challenged. The barrier to successfully transitioning from a “gut-feeling” type of culture (System 1) to a data-driven type of approach (System 2) is the people.

Experienced managers and executives tend to believe on their “intuition” to, quite often, make high-stakes decisions. That has to do a lot with many different types of biases that we’ll cover here, but not limited to. But, also with decision making based on emotions, which research has proven to not be recommended.

Just to clarify, by executives and managers, we really mean anybody that is in charge of making decisions, regardless of his/her title on the business card.

The Five Most Dangerous Biases

Bias can be defined as, “a particular tendency, trend, inclination, feeling, or opinion, especially one that is preconceived or unreasoned”. Out of the many biases that impact all of us negatively, overconfidence is the worst. Explicitly, when comes down to decision-making processing.

“Our gut makes us more vulnerable to cognitive biases such as overconfidence” — Max H. Bazerman

Decision-makers must acknowledge that they functioning under certain types of biases. Without this realization, it will be extremely difficult to break the wheel of making poor decisions. Managers tend to blame everything else when things go down hill, but take enormous credit when they succeed.

Here I’ll cover a little bit of the main types of biases that can impact decision-making.

1. **Overconfidence: **Research says that, “overconfidence may be the mother of all decision-making biases” [2]. And that the “excessive faith that you know the truth is one form of overconfidence” [2]. If you are too certain that you are making the best decision, you better be doing that supported by data. Remember, “garbage in, garbage out”. Just because you might be using data, that does not mean you’ll succeed every time.
2. **Confirmation Bias: **This is an effort to find a justification to a selective matter. Here we’ll look for anything that can support and confirm our beliefs and values. That is, we are consistently finding excuses to explain our failures without taking responsibilities for them.
3. **Unrealistically Positive Views of Self: **Typically, this can be seen as a going hand in hand with overconfidence. In this bias, the person has an extremely positive view of him/herself. Specially, people that rely on experience to make decisions, tend to get a very strong positive view of themselves. A pill of humility every morning can be an effective remedy here.

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