Marketing and Sales Analytics: Proven Techniques and Powerful Applications from Industry Leaders

10. Managing Bias—Like Air, Invisible and Everywhere

Wikipedia’s “List of cognitive biases” page runs to nearly one hundred ways we either twist or ignore facts we are presented with—and these are just the ones related to decision-making, behavior, and beliefs.¹ However, conventional economic thinking of the past several decades has depended on the assumption that people act rationally in making decisions, relying on fully engaged logical faculties. Many routine presentations of analytic findings seem to be built on this assumption as well.

1. “List of biases in judgment and decision making,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_biases_in_judgment_and_decision_making.

The psychologist Daniel Kahneman, author of the best-selling book Thinking, ...