11: Biases: When Leaders' Decision-making Goes Awry

Making intuitive decisions is fast. To do so, we take mental shortcuts that allow us to make decisions efficiently. Those mental shortcuts are called heuristics. They are intuitive, unconscious, rapid, and automatic, speeding up our decision-making process so fast that we sometimes cannot even articulate why we make a decision. Efficient decision-making powered by heuristics serves us well in daily life. When we see someone in danger and need help, we are likely to lend a helping hand – without a cost-benefit analysis. Walking into a social setting, we size up social dynamics within 40 milliseconds. In less than one-20th of a second, our brain processes nonverbal cues such as eye contact and body posture. Our brains then make a snap judgment of social hierarchy, such as who is dominant and who is subservient. Show us a human face, and our brains process the information about race within 100 milliseconds. About 50 milliseconds later, our brains process information about gender. Those mental processes take place so fast that we are not even sure we have seen something. By contrast, making a conscious decision is slow. To activate a conscious process that demands attention and working memory, it takes about 500 milliseconds (i.e., half a second).