Do you select tasks to overtask?

If someone says, Is Anna likeable? But this false suggestion and over-simplification might lead you to make an incorrect assumption about her. You won't even realize that you're making the wrong assumption because your brain will come up with enough stories to explain your feelings. Maybe you saw Anna help an old lady cross the road once, and that has formed your opinion. What you might neglect to note is that Anna could be mean to animals. Whatever your opinion is, chances are you will explain away your actions through a story. We seek confirmation for our beliefs and ignore everything else. In his article You Are Not So Smart, David Mc. Raney discussed a study that took place in a department store. Here, nylon stockings were arranged, and the subjects of the study had to rate their quality just by looking at them. For example, corporate governance codes in Germany, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom apply this approach, setting standards for boards' audit and compensation committees. The disclosed information helps investors, proxy advisors, and shareholders evaluate a board's decisions, actions, and outcomes and take appropriate action. With the comply-or-explain approach, the government in effect sets a soft default for companies. It defines what it considers to be the desired course of affairs and asks companies opting out of them to explain why. While not restricting choices, such soft defaults create a reference point that people dislike leaving. And they leverage our inertia, with people and organizations avoiding or delaying change that might be costly and painful. Default setting is a powerful instrument in a behavioral designer's toolbox. When opting out is required to change the status quo, the enrollment rate in retirement savings plans has been shown to be up to almost 40 percentage points higher in opt-out than in opt-in plans. An increasing number of countries are now using the comply-or-explain approach to promote gender diversity. The Australian Securities Exchange, for example, asks companies to report annually their diversity policies and degree of diversity.

They might answer your question with a question so they need not provide an answer. If you asked, Why did you shoot him? Beware of equivocation. If they avoid answering your questions by using vague and uncertain expressions, and weak modifiers, then you want to be on high alert. I'm talking about words like maybe, sort of, think, perhaps, guess, about, approximately, could, might, and so on. These expressions give them some wiggle room to back out of statements they make when confronted in the future. Also, watch out for noncommittal verbs like assume, figure, believe, guess, and so on, and vague qualifiers like more or less, or you might say. Oaths are a red flag. The liar will do their best to convince you that what they say is God's honest truth. You must believe them, because cross my heart they'd never lie. The majority chose the stocking that was towards the right. Here's the catch--all the stockings were identical. When these people were then asked to explain their choice, they commented on the texture of the stocking, but not one of them mentioned the position as the reason for their choice. Even when they were asked outright whether the position influenced their decision, the subjects answered with certainty that the placement had no impact whatsoever. That is how unaware we are of how biased our decisions can be. If our decisions don't add up, we get creative with our rationalizations and move onto something else. Even when we read articles, our objective is not to learn something new, it's to validate an existing notion. Through a customer buying trend report during the 2008 U. Even our memory isn't reliable in these circumstances. The way we recall events also supports our beliefs and conveniently leaves out details that don't fit our narrative.

They must not only report the fraction of female employees overall, but also the number of women in senior positions and on a company's board of directors. Finally, they must spell out their overall goals regarding gender diversity and to what degree they have met them. Similarly, in Canada, the Ontario Securities Commission introduced comply-or-explain rules in 2014 that required companies listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange to annually disclose: Spurred by the Davies Report of 2011, which I introduced in the previous article, the United Kingdom has likely gone the farthest, using disclosure requirements toward successfully reaching its target of 25 percent female directors by the end of 2015. In 2015, there were no all-male boards left among the FTSE 100 companies, which is a first in the history of the London Stock Exchange. In the same year, more than 90 percent of the FTSE 250 companies were gender diverse, whereas in 2011, more than half of these boards were male only. In 2013, the Netherlands followed suit and set a 30 percent goal for both corporate supervisory and executive boards, specifying that at least 30 percent of the seats should be held by women. If a company fails to meet this goal, it must explain why and what actions it plans to take to meet the goal in the future. Disclosure requirements are popular in part because they help people make more informed decisions without limiting their autonomy. It is left up to shareholders, investors, analysts, and the public to decide how to use the disclosed information. You'll hear, I swear. Sometimes that's not enough, so they'll say, I swear on my honor, or I swear on my mother's grave. Conversely, someone who is honest does not feel the need to convince you, since they are confident of what they're saying and certain that the facts will stand up for them. Euphemisms are also red flags. Almost every language will give an alternate term for most actions and situations. Guilty liars will use vague or mild words, rather than synonyms explicit in nature. They do this to make you listen more favorably and downplay whatever they did. So if they say missing when they could have said stolen, replace the word took with borrowed, say bumped rather than hit, or claim to have warned someone instead of saying threatened, then you're likely dealing with a liar. A liar will allude to actions. They'll never really say they did them.

Another study was conducted where two groups were presented with a day-in-the-life story about someone called Jane. The way the story was narrated could indicate that Jane could be introverted AND extroverted both. After a few days, one group was asked whether they thought Jane would make a good librarian, and the others were asked if she would make a good real estate agent. Since the first group remembered her as an introvert, they told the researcher she'd be better off as a librarian, while the other remembered her as an extrovert and said she would be a great fit as a real estate agent. Now, in this case, the confirmation bias led the subjects to remember details that confirmed the question. They weren't considering the contradictory parts of the story that would allow them to arrive at a different answer. At the end of the research, when they were questioned and even informed of another choice, the respondents still insisted that Jane wasn't suited for the other job. We carry this opinion into the stereotypes we form about people too. If you believe all artists to be free-spirited, if you meet such an artist, your mind will applaud you for being right. This mode of thinking can dictate our entire worldview. Those unconcerned about gender may disregard it while those who care about the inclusion of both sexes in decision making and leadership may act on it. However, we know little about whether, how, or to what degree gender diversity disclosure is working to promote diversity. These provisions were recently introduced and were often accompanied by additional interventions, making it impossible to tease apart the particular relevance of disclosures. Also, specific disclosure rules vary greatly across the countries that have adopted them. One comparative fact, however, stands out. In the United States, where the disclosure requirements were unspecific and not intended to steer behavior, the share of female directors has moved little in recent years, with 16. It is hard to imagine that the United Kingdom was able to surpass the United States in that same time frame without the Davies Report and the evaluative transparency that comes with disclosures. Still, the question remains: does disclosure work? Disclosure in other domains, sometimes based on randomized controlled trials, offers insights and caveats. One facet of the US Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 sheds useful light.

They'll say, I try to make sure I water the lawn every day, rather than I water the lawn every day. Or, I decided that we were going to take a walk through the woods. Well, did they walk through the woods? They might say, I needed to go over the articles with her. All these are allusions, and they're not saying definitively that they did -or did not - do these things. Liars will give too little detail. They want to keep their statements short and sweet. Few liars have the imagination to create detailed stories of things that never happened. Besides, the fewer the details, the better for the liar, so they don't get caught when contradicting evidence pops up. Now, when telling the truth, details that seem inconsequential will pop up, because they're trying to pull from long term memory, which stores many things besides this main event. Now in some cases, confirmation bias also provides us with excellent evolutionary advantages. The reason we are susceptible to confirmation bias in the first place is that it is an efficient way to process information. We are bombarded with so much information daily that it is not possible to carefully evaluate all the information we are given. Sometimes we need to process information quickly for our survival, or even to protect our self-esteem. And there is nothing wrong with finding information that recalls a preexisting belief or hypothesis. It is only negative if that bias ends up giving us the wrong answer, which in turn produces negative consequences. The definition for confirmation biases matches scientific thinking in some ways. For both, we are searching for information that confirms a hypothesis. It is when we are fixed in our understanding of that hypothesis that this type of thinking can be faulty. The impact of confirmation bias is interesting to evaluate.