Question

Discussion—Behavioral Heuristics

Behavioral heuristics, such as availability, anchoring, vividness, storage, conjunction fallacy, and representativeness, all reflect behavioral traits, which if left unchecked may lead to systematic bias in the choices you make. For example, anchoring and availability can lead to disastrous decisions.

You may know how to recognize these heuristics, but consider how they may have influenced you in the past.

Find at least one example from your own career where you, or another manager, allowed one of these or another pitfall, to sway you from the mean.

Respond to the following:

Why did you/they ignore the base rates?

What other statistically relevant factors did you/they fail to incorporate?

How could you have altered the framing of the situation to make a better decision?

By the due date assigned, post your response to the appropriate Discussion Area. Through the end of the module, review and comment on at least two peers’ responses.

Write your initial response in 300–500 words.

Answer 1

I re when I was working with a journalism organization, and I had asked my deputy editor to put one of the sponsors names in the story, he called towards the affect heuristic to devaite fro mthe rational thought of involving the sponsor to a more negative affect and experiential based thought on the basis of which he decided to edit out the so called sponsor name.

It led to severe harassment calls on behalf of the sponsor later on to repeatedly mend the story later on.

The decision should not have been taken with respect to other instances of involving sponsors in, as those stories were different and were better off without the names of the sponsors, but, in this particular instance, it was necessary to have them in, and were a vital component of the story,but due to experiential affect rather than rational analysis, it was a failure on the part of the organization.