Monthly Archives: April 2014

Cognitive Bias: Bandwidth Bias

Part 6 in our “Cognitive Bias and Leadership” On our January 16, 2013 blog, I gave an overview of cognitive bias (our tendency to filter information through our own past experiences, likes, and dislikes) and surmised that it can lead to judgments that are faulty.  We have been exploring how these biases affect the ability to lead and make good decisions. In the 6th in our series, I wanted to talk about Bandwidth Bias.  This is the tendency to go with the crowd.  It can also be called “groupthink” and when it turns negative, it can be a “mob mentality.”   And this can happen in groups large and small.  It can happen in your family, in your department or team at work, or across an entire culture. Why does this happen? We like to conform.  We like to fit in.  Consider the famous experiments by Solomon Asch, psychologist from the 1950s, who conducted experiments where participants were part of vision exercise where they had…

How to Be (and Measure) Happy at Work

Have you ever tried speaking to a tough crowd?  How about teaching positive psychology to engineers? Jocelyn Davis, of Nelson Hart LLC (@nelsonhartllc) has done just that at the University of Maryland for the last eight years.  So she knows a tough audience.  She shared the example on our webinar that often moves her students.  Imagine that you had a high performance automobile and you ran it for weeks or months in the red zone.  (At this point she says her students have their eyes wide open.)  What would happen to the car?  At some point it would no longer be a high performance car.   You’d have to take it off the track.  Students quickly grasp the analogy that you cannot burn yourself out at work – long hours with no breaks or no vacations, and still be ‘high performance’…