How understanding natural biases can make you a better colleague.

Everyone uses cognitive biases to speed up their decision making process. They are as old as decision making itself. The most common bias is "confirmation bias." It's a great description for the tendency of people to blindly accept evidence that supports their theory, but hold in great skepticism anything that undermines their theory. If you've ever read something in order to prove your point in an argument, then you're most likely guilty of confirmation bias.

Why does this matter to you? After all you're a marketer, an entrepreneur or a web guy, not a researcher. It's important because everyone is a decision maker at some point in their work and if you're not aware of the biases that effect you, then you can't be proactive in overcoming them.

It's easy to be a skeptic of other people's work, but it's much harder to be a skeptic of your own ideas. So next time you find yourself debating with a business colleague, stop and step back for a moment. Take a look and see if you're really employing critical thinking, or merely looking for evidence that confirms your own point of view.