Cognative Bias: Jumping to Conclusions
A few days ago, the folks over at the Business of Software blog posted an article on how the human minds tends to jump to conclusions. For me, this turned out to be a fairly timely article that I kept coming back to over the last couple of days.
This artificial experiment is an interesting illustration of a couple of human tendencies. First of all, we jump to conclusions. Secondly - more important, but also far more subtle - we tend to seek out evidence that confirms our hasty conclusions, rather than evidence that might contradict them.
At work, I often find myself trying to make educated guesses from very little information while trying to debug issues found in either QA or released code. One of the things I’ve gotten burnt by several times now is exactly the type of failure to test my initial conclusions that this article describes. I’ll be fairly convinced of my initial conclusion, mention it to someone else, and have them shoot (what were in retrospect) very obvious holes in my theory. As a result, I’ve been trying to apply a much more systemic approach to confirming my initial theories before taking them to anyone else. It’s been helping so far; at least when I remember it that is! Overall, I highly recommend this one for anyone who has to solve problems with insufficient information.
As for the Business of Software conference itself, man do I wish I could afford to attend. Sounds like it’ll be a blast, but at “only” $1495, that’s not going to happen anytime soon.