The Importance of Seeking Multiple Perspectives In the workplace to Make Bias-free Decisions

Eye Care Professionals (ECPs) are subject to cognitive biases that can affect their clinical and non-clinical decisions and render their diagnoses and treatment decisions vulnerable to error. While less importance has been given to cognitive biases in the Optometry literature, we find a lot of importance is given in the medicine and aviation industry. Our brain can trick us in many ways into a wrong reality or misconception of a true situation, allowing cognitive biases to hinder our ability to make accurate decisions. The effect that cognitive biases may have on the final outcome in an optometry practice due to wrong decisions can be small or large but sometimes irremediable. Therefore, learning how to identify and avoid cognitive biases by every ECP in practice should be a priority for every practice owner.

There are many types of cognitive bias that can affect ECPs decision-making:

Ambiguity effect: There is no investment without risk. Whenever the risk in an investment is higher we are supposed to gain higher returns. Almost the same applies to other decisions in the workplace where unless we go out of our comfort zone and try new ambiguous and untapped methods we will never get better results. The Ambiguity Effect describes how we tend to avoid options and courses of action that seem to be ambiguous to us or seem to be missing information. Humans by nature dislike uncertainty, therefore, they prefer to choose options and courses of action with known outcomes rather than other more ambiguous options that may have better outcomes.

Anchoring bias: The anchoring effect is often used by salesmen as a way to negotiate with potential clients. It is a cognitive bias that is based on the human propensity to put a lot of emphasis on the first piece of information offered to them to make a decision about buying a product, signing a contract, or agreeing on a quotation. The initial piece of information that a salesman using the anchoring effect provides the client will mostly affect how he will make subsequent judgments.

Attentional bias: is the human propensity to attend to emotional information more than others often equal or more valuable information. Biased decisions are made when we fail to consider all pieces of information and while we give a lot of attention to some information we tend to ignore other information that is valuable and can lead to different outcomes.

Availability cascade: Availability cascade is a bias that occurs when humans perceive that information is true because it is highly repeated in among the public. It also acts as a self-reinforcing cycle that the more it is repeated the more everyone believes it is true. This brings to mind the “Lindy Effect”, a concept of belief often repeated by Nassim and that he clearly described in his 2014 book Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder. The Lindy Effect “essentially states that the longer a non-perishable item has been around, the longer it’s likely to persist into the future“. So sometimes we are biased to believe that the longer the systems we use in the workplace have been in place and operating the more likely they will persist and are not going to fail. We’ve seen this during the pandemic where the recently implemented telehealth and telemedicine systems persisted more than other in-office systems.