Workers look for familiar patterns and apply well-tried solutions to a problem. There is the temptation to settle for satisfactory solutions rather than continue seeking a better solutions. The mental biases, or shortcuts, often used to reduce mental effort and expedite decision-making include:
Assumptions – A condition taken for granted or accepted as true without verification of the facts.
Habit – An unconscious pattern of behavior acquired through frequent repetition.
Confirmation bias – The reluctance to abandon a current solution—to change one’s mind—in light of conflicting information due to the investment of time and effort in the current solution. This bias orients the mind to “see” evidence that supports the original supposition and to ignore or rationalize away conflicting data.
Similarity bias – The tendency to recall solutions from situations that appear similar to those that have proved useful from past experience.
Frequency bias – A gamble that a frequently used solution will work; giving greater weight to information that occurs more frequently or is more recent.
Availability bias – The tendency to settle on solutions or courses of action that readily come to mind and appear satisfactory; more weight is placed on information that is available (even though it could be wrong).3 4 This is related to a tendency to assign a cause-effect relationship between two events because they occur almost at the same time.
