What do I know now?

My wife and I have corona and are not allowed to leave the house. As medicine we watch and comment on an episode of I leave. Two hip Amsterdammers emigrate with their children to Portugal. The leader of the program immediately activates all kinds of prejudices in me. But less than ten minutes later I learn that after a severe burnout she has turned her career around and he has recovered from cancer. An hour later, there is mainly respect for the couple.

For my work, I’ve been studying the fallacies we make when judging people and making decisions for years. But that doesn’t mean I’m less prone to it. What happened with this TV program is an example of the representativeness heuristic: a cognitive rule of thumb in which you immediately classify people and things on the basis of one or a few characteristics. Amsterdam? talkers! Emigrating before your 40th? Spoiled!

The fact that I myself lived in Amsterdam for a number of years and that our family stayed outside the Netherlands for a while does not play a role at such a moment.

It is completely smart to keep your mouth shut until you know something more and have thought a little better

The American political scientist Herbert Simon gave this phenomenon a name in the 1950s: bounded rationalitybounded rationality. According to Simon, it is usually not possible for us humans to have all the facts necessary to make optimal decisions and then systematically evaluate them. So we make do with bits of information and simple thinking procedures.

A few weeks ago I talked about it extensively with a group of students. One of them told how, after reading a piece about the availability heuristic, realized that she often formed her opinions about other people too quickly and too easily. Only on the basis of the information that she could quickly and easily recall from her own memory. “When I think of Mark Rutte, I always immediately think of those photos in which he is laughing. And then I hate him because I don’t think he takes the problems in the country seriously.”

We realized together that you often know very little about colleagues, fellow students and administrators, and yet you think you know them or can estimate them. But who really knows whether Ernst Kuipers is a more suitable Minister of Health than Hugo de Jonge? And who can actually estimate Rutte’s leadership qualities? Or assess whether serious work is being done on a new administrative culture in The Hague? Which facts do we really know and how do we know whether they are representative? What do I know now?

When making important decisions or making serious judgments, it is good to ask yourself these kinds of critical questions. What also helps is actively seeking out information that doesn’t match what you already know. And it’s really smart to just keep your mouth shut until you know a little more and have thought a little more. (Just in between: it would be wonderfully quiet in most talk shows and on social media). Tonight I’m going to practice again with a new episode of I’m leaving.

Ben Tiggelaar writes weekly about personal leadership, work and management.