Writing about bias is tricky. Unless you are a robot from another planet, your own bias will show. Just try to write about the Dunning Kruger effect – the erroneous belief that we know more about a topic than we do – and not sound like a know-it-all. While researching this post, I came across an article with great concrete examples. Two of them made me think, “Wow, how biased!” But maybe that is because I am biased! Does that mean everything is biased?

No. Just as we grab an umbrella when we see dark clouds in April, we act on accepted truths in our business. If we did not, we would not be able to cooperate and get things done. Truth is important!

And yet, do not knock bias altogether. Our biases allow us to act fast. If you start down a dark alley and see someone hunched against the wall, your personal bias might make you hurry out of the alley. Bias might have saved your life! And yet, someone else with a different bias may have kept walking.

So, how do we balance facts and bias in our business presentations to arrive at something resembling the truth?

Evaluating the dark alleys in your business often requires more than a snap judgment based on one individual’s personal bias. Presentations are opportunities to set bias aside and agree on facts. Presentations are also opportunities to explore different opinions, which can be coloured by bias. These two activities – looking at the facts and debating opinions – help a group of people agree on the truth and decide together whether to brave the alley or walk in the opposite direction.

A problem arises when presenters confuse opinion with fact and vice versa. Or, when an information-driven presentation leaves the audience to rely solely on personal opinion to interpret the information and make a decision. In the past few months, I have taught several workshops that showed just how difficult avoiding this problem can be.

The problem stems from bias, which makes separating opinion from fact more difficult. It does not help that the usual sources of facts – studies, reports, news, and government – are increasingly biased themselves, routinely presenting opinion as fact and fact as opinion. Presenters must work harder to recognize bias and help their audience to do the same.

In this newsletter, we cherry pick some common cognitive biases. Knowing them will help you to spot and overcome them in your presentations. We have also included an example visual that overcomes bias and illustrates fact. Prepare to have your own assumptions challenged!

Practice differentiating between opinions and facts and helping your audience to do the same. Who knows? You might get your business out of that dark alley. You might even save its life.

The Affect Heuristic

“Hey! Want to go skiing this weekend?”

“My client just told me he is unhappy with the job we have spent six months completing. I think I’ll say no.”

What does going skiing have to do with a poor review from a client? Chances are, nothing. If our skiing enthusiast had asked the question one day later, he might be planning the trip right now. What is at play in this brief exchange is the affect heuristic and it is a big reason why presenters must engage emotion in their audience members.

The affect heuristic describes how emotion caused by unrelated events can impact our decisions and actions. Stub your toe at Starbuck’s and you might bark at the coffee barista to hurry it up with your Americano coffee. You are not angry with the barista. You are angry with the pain in your toe.

Similarly, members of your audience might be feeling strong emotions based on other events and yet, those emotions cause them to decide in a particular way after your presentation.

That is why you must evoke emotion in the audience. This is what Aristotle called pathos and said was critical, along with logos (data and facts) and ethos (moral credibility), to a persuasive argument. How do you evoke emotion? Use stories, everyday language, and examples.

If a decision maker walks into your presentation feeling frustrated about something unrelated, and your presentation does not achieve pathos, you might leave that decision maker to act based on that frustration. You might have shot yourself in the foot. Which is far worse than stubbing your toe.

Bandwagon Effect

Who doesn’t love a good bandwagon? There are plenty of them these days and while they may be tempting – “Come on! Hop on the bandwagon!” – they often lead us in directions we did not expect or desire. Give in to the temptation and you might find that everyone starts hopping off that bandwagon only to clamber onto another and claim they were never on that other bandwagon in the first place! (Are you keeping up? Bandwagons can get confusing.)

We humans are tribal creatures and the bandwagon effect is our habit of adopting certain behaviours of beliefs because many other people do the same. I read that bandwagons often go off cliffs. Reminds me of when my mother used to ask me, “If they all jumped off a bridge, would you?” And yet here we are, confronted with more pressure than ever to follow the crowd and not enough people asking, “If they all jumped off a bridge, would I?”

You can stay off the opinion bandwagon and remain in the facts in a few ways:

• The moment it looks like majority opinion, question it.
• Talk to people or read the opinions of people who are not on the bandwagon.
• If one data set proves the majority opinion is true, try to find one that disproves it. Or one that proves the opposite.

Be skeptical when “everyone” seems to telling the same story. They might be on a bandwagon. Until you test the story’s truth, resist the urge to jump on yourself. It could be no one knows why they are on it. Or worse, they do not see the cliff it is racing towards.

Belief Perseverence

If you realize you are on a bandwagon, can see the cliff it is headed for, and want to get your team off of it, you have your work cut out for you. Why? Because of belief perseverance, our tendency to hold tightly to established beliefs even when faced with clear evidence to the contrary. Even when it might be in our best interest to let go!

As Mark Twain once said, “It’s easier to fool people than to convince them they have been fooled.”

This is why facts alone are rarely effective in getting anyone to change their mind about anything. You can hit someone with a slide full of data proving that swimming pools kill more people than guns and they will walk out of your presentation still believing guns are more dangerous than swimming pools. How then do you convince someone to let go of a faulty belief?

Use a story. It could be a well-told “Once upon a time” story or it could be the way you structure your information. Use contrast to illustrate a challenge exists. Paint a picture of the solution. Pair data with examples to communicate truth. Contrast what they believe about the world with what is true about the world.

How you set up the story depends on the point you are trying to make. The general lesson here is to take your time. Walk them through a well told story and they might loosen their grip on existing beliefs before they are aware they have done so.

Click on the image below to watch creator Beau Janzen challenge an existing, but erroneous, belief by showing rather than telling. Most people will believe the triangles are not equal. If Mr. Janzen simply stated, “The triangles are of equal size,” the audience might not care about that fact, let alone accept it as fact. Instead, his powerful visual piques our curiosity, overwhelms our previously held beliefs, and shows us the truth.

False Consensus Effect

It could be belief perseverance does not matter to a presenter because they assume everyone holds the same belief anyway. “Of course that belief perseveres! It is the one we all believe! Hurray!”

We have just bumped into another bias. The false consensus effect is how we regularly overestimate how much others share our beliefs, values, and behaviours. In my work, I observe this more and more frequently in presentations. My amateur opinion is this is more pronounced today because we largely consume information that is biased towards our beliefs.

From news, to social media, and even to the people we spend time talking to, we build echo chambers for ourselves. The days of routinely hearing the “other side of the story” are gone. Now we must actively work to weigh both sides of an issue. Without the time or the inclination to engage with the “other side” of an issue, we can easily develop the distorted view that everyone thinks the way we do.

In presentations, this bias pops up when presenters take a fact, dip it in commentary or opinion, and present the whole thing as accepted truth. The presenter assumes everyone in the audience shares his or her view of things. It is a dangerous gamble. Those in the audience who hold different opinions can start to distrust or lose respect for the presenter. And those audience members might be critical to the success of the presentation.

The best way to avoid this pitfall is to separate fact from opinion after you have put your presentation together. The best way to separate them is to practice your presentation out loud and listen carefully. When you are offering opinion, is it clear that is what you are doing? Are you presenting alternate opinions? Is your opinion based on expertise and careful analysis of the facts? Or, is it based on bias?

If you are struggling to separate fact from opinion, try rehearsing with someone who thinks differently than you do. Give them free rein to let you know when you are assuming a false consensus.

Decision Fatigue

Regardless of what we do, we may still be up against a faulty decision based on bias only because of this one, decision fatigue. Thinking and deciding consumes a lot of energy. All of us, regardless of where we sit on the org chart, suffer from fatigue when the energy runs out.

In his book, Thinking Fast and Slow, Nobel-prize-winning psychologist, Daniel Kahneman, teaches us that the brain uses twenty percent of the body’s total energy. This is remarkable when you consider the number of other organs, muscles, and systems working all day to keep you up and running. To conserve and use this energy sparingly and effectively, Mr. Kahneman says we use two systems of thought and decision making.

The one we gravitate to, to avoid exhausting ourselves, is System 1 which is fast and intuitive. Go back to our alley way example. Spotting the hunched-over stranger and getting out of the alley is a System 1 decision. We did not use a lot of mental energy. Instead we relied on intuition which is informed by many things including our personal biases.

We do not want to rely on System 1 for all of our business decisions. A lot of the time, want to encourage our audience members to slow down and rely on System 2, decision making that relies on mental effort and energy. The trouble is, our audience members may resist using System 2 because of the energy it requires. This resistance can be reduced if we think about when we present and how we present.

Decision fatigue kicks in when we have too many choices available for one decision, or too many decisions preceding the one we must make. Our brains, depleted of its energy, is worn out and its cognitive abilities weakened. We all know what it is to feel overwhelmed by too many choices or too many decisions in a row. How much do you enjoy making important decisions at the end of your work day? That is decision fatigue.

If you have an important presentation that requires mental effort and energy on the part of your audience, schedule that presentation for early in the day, before they spend hours making other decisions. In your presentation, make sure you have curated the choices available to them by recommending ones you think are most viable. You must tell them these are your recommendations based on your expertise. However, making those recommendations will remove some of the cognitive effort your audience must make.

Doing both might slow things down and overcome the fatigue.

Want More?

If you are interested in reading about more cognitive biases – some experts cite more than 70 of them! – you can start here.

In the end, being aware of your biases, and how to overcome them in your audience, will improve the chance that your presentations will help your business make good decisions and stay out of dark alleys.

Watch for the signs and you will start quickly seeing which road you are on – fact or opinions. It will be a fascinating journey that leads you to captivating presentations and, ultimately, the truth.

Happy presenting!