Archive for December 9th, 2020

Fundamental attribution error impacts how we interpret things that we observe people doing. Specifically we have a tendency to focus on attributes or intentions of the person themselves versus the situation or the environment when explaining a person’s behavior. Where this comes into play in analytics is often in the process of translating analytical observations […]

Anchoring is our tendency to focus or rely too heavily on the first piece of information that’s available to us. This bias is regularly exploited in areas like pricing and negotiation. As analysts, we always question our analyses. But it’s also important to question why we’re questioning our analysis and make sure we’re asking ourselves […]

Availability or vividness bias is the tendency to believe recent or vivid events are more likely to occur. There are all sorts of common examples of this, like how people perceive the risk of a plane crash or getting attacked by a shark. Both events are exceedingly rare, but are often perceived to happen more […]

The framing effect is the tendency to draw different conclusions from information based on how it’s presented. It turns out that framing things in a positive way can elicit different results than in framing them in a more negative way. As data analysts, we keep this in mind both as we look at options and […]

Confirmation bias is the tendency to favor information that confirms one’s beliefs or hypotheses. There are really two ways that we can exhibit this bias. The first is by selectively gathering information that is we only seek out data that would serve to support a hypothesis and fail to seek out data that might disprove […]