Free Custom «Decision Making Bias» Essay Paper

Decision making can be described as mental processes that enable a person to choose an action to be taken in regard to a particular issue. There are different approaches that have been utilized throughout the history of the human beings in making decisions, either knowingly or unknowingly. As a result, scholars and researchers have taken the decisions making processes as a subject of study and research in order to understand how these processes are carried out. Whereas there are many reasons why people make certain decisions in the society in regard to the issues that they come across, most of these decisions are driven by personal biases and emotions.Research FindingsIt was found out that generally people have different ways or rather perspectives of looking at issues of concern in their lives. As a result of varying perspectives, the decisions that were made concerning a specific issue in the society differed greatly, one from the other among different people in the society. This was attributed to the fact that decision makers focused on the evidence they thought best fit their lives or rather perspective while equally ignoring evidence that could influence their decisions in a different direction (Koehler and Harvey 95). Consequently, this resulted in a biased decision-making processes.It was also noted that there are few people in the society who rarely influenced by decision-making biases. In this line of thought, individuals were affected by at least one of the following cognitive biases in their decision making process; inertia, discriminatory search for evidence, selective perception, repetition bias and group think (Stroh, Gregory and Neale 235). Whereas these were important cognitive factors in making decisions, they often resulted in biased decisions.

 

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Research DiscussionThere were different ways or factors that could be integrated in the decision-making process to compensate for the biases that had been made in these decisions. One of these factors or rather ways of avoiding decision-making biases was adopting a combinational cognitive style of making decisions. This was whereby one's decisions were made based on the current position and the future goal that one wanted to achieve. In this regard, the decision maker evaluated his or her current position, set goal to achieve and then make decisions that are geared toward achieving these goals (Stroh, Gregory and Neale 362).

Similarly, evaluation and analysis of the decisions that were made in the past and their outcome is one of the important elements that could eliminate completely or lower the level of biases in any decision that was made (Koehler and Harvey 136). Since most of the issues that one faced in life or in the society are likely to have occurred in the past, it is important to evaluate how such issues were tackled by examining and analyzing the decisions that were made. In line with this, it is also important for one assess the outcome of these decisions. For instance, it was easy to eliminate biases that resulted from inertia whereby one was unwilling to change his or her thought patterns by looking at the decisions that were made in regard to the issue of concern and the outcome of these decisions.Whereas there are many reasons why people make certain decisions in the society in regard to the issues that they come across, most of these decisions are driven by personal biases and emotions. In this regard, there are different types of decisions making biases that exist among people in the society. Alongside these are discriminatory search for evidence, group think and repetition bias. In spite of the fact that decision making biases are prevalent in the society and among organizations, there are various ways that these biases can be compensated for or rather avoided. First, this can be done through an analysis of the past decisions that were made concerning a particular issue and the outcome of these decisions. On the other hand, one can adopt a combinational cognitive style of making decisions whereby goals were set based on the current position or status of an issue and then make decisions that would enable one to achieve these goals.