The Handbook of Project Management, 6th Edition

Chapter 32 Behavioral bias

Bent Flyvbjerg

DOI: 10.4324/9781003274179-36

Introduction

Psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman pioneered the study of behavioral bias. Since they did their original, Nobel Prize-winning work, the number of biases identified by behavioral scientists has exploded in what has been termed a behavioral revolution in economics, management, and across the social sciences. Today, Wikipedia’s list of cognitive biases contains more than 200 items. The present paper gives an overview of the most important behavioral biases in project management, summarized in Table 32.1 (for more biases and more detail, see Flyvbjerg 2021). They are the biases most likely to trip up project managers and negatively impact project ...