Mistakes are a part of life, but when they happen in business, they can be costly. That's why Management Muse brought you this episode, to help you identify a common management mistake—question substitution error—and to improve your own decision-making skills. Today, Cindi and Geoff discuss substitution error, which happens when our brains unconsciously replace the tougher questions in our day-to-day lives with simpler ones, because our brains are constantly trying to help us find shortcuts. The substitution error occurs at work and at home, and almost happened to Cindi and Geoff as a very costly mistake on vacation. This episode also covers the destructive impact of exhaustion, hunger, and decision fatigue on our decision making. Cindi and Geoff also talk about how hiring can end up as a question substitution error (Do I like this person?(easy) instead of Is this person likely to be successful in this job?(harder), and how to reduce the negative effect of question substitution at work and at home. Episode Highlights:
- Question substitution occurs when our brains default to simpler questions, like How do I feel right now?(simple), instead of How do I feel about the issue I’m facing? (harder).
- When hiring new employees, it’s easy to ask ourselves how we feel about a person. The harder question is whether the interviewee will be successful in the position.
- When our brain senses that something is hard, it tries to reduce the cognitive load by simplifying, or by looking for a quicker and easier rule of thumb to generate an answer. That’s often helpful, but not always.
- When we are tired or in decision fatigue, we’ll often agree to anything, just to get out of the decision-making situation, or we’ll select the safest, most conservative decision. Both of these shortcuts replace a harder question (What should we actually decide?) with an easier question (How do I get out of this mentally taxing situation quickly?).
Time Stamps: [5:06] Deep dive into question substitution and how the brain routinely substitutes the hard questions into simpler ones to reduce our cognitive load [16:09] How the unpredictability of job interviews encourages question substitution [26:15] How tiredness, hunger, and repeated decisions cause decision fatigue [35:04] How to cope with the hard questions to reduce management errors [44:26] How to move toward better decisions Episode Resources:
Thinking Fast and Slow (2011) by Daniel Kahneman, Penguin: New York. See Chapter 9: Answering an Easier Question.Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength (2011) by Roy Baumeister and James Tierney, Penguin: New York.Danziger, S., Levav, J., and Avnaim-Pesso, L. (2011) Extraneous factors in judicial decisions. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 108(17), 6889-6892. We incorrectly referred to the Israeli Parole Board study as being from Roy Baumsieter and colleagues, when, in fact, the study is from Shai Danziger referenced above.
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