The Truth About Managing People, Third Edition

Truth 53. Judging Others: Tips for Making Better Decisions

The performance-review process requires a large component of decision making. We’ve learned over the years that making decision judgments is fraught with biases. Here, we want to alert you to several additional judgmental distortions that we’re all vulnerable to and offer some advice on how you can minimize those distortions.

Overconfidence bias. When we’re given factual questions and asked to judge the probability that our answers are correct, we tend to be far too optimistic. For instance, studies have found that when people say they’re 65 to 70 percent confident that they’re right, they were actually correct only about 50 percent of the time. And when they say they’re 100 percent sure, ...