The Awareness of Bias Susceptibility and Individual Bias Blind Spots in Managerial Decisions

This article explores managerial decision styles as potential predictors of individual bias awareness and bias blind spots. A survey with 500 C-1 level managers from Forbes 2000 companies also provides a ranking of the most prevalent perceived cognitive biases in managerial decisions. The results show that the awareness of one’s susceptibility and the bias blind spots are highly different depending on an individual’s decision style and type of cognitive bias. Decision makers with a strong tendency towards a rational or spontaneous decision style see themselves as less vulnerable to cognitive biases, but also show a much stronger bias blind spot than those with the tendency towards other decision styles. On the other hand, decision makers with a strong tendency towards an intuitive decision style tend to recognize their own vulnerability to cognitive biases and show even a negative blind spot – thus seeing themselves more flawed by cognitive biases than others. As a result, the individual decision style may serve as a predictor for one’s own susceptibility for cognitive biases and bias blind spots.