The Truth-Seeker’s Handbook by Gleb Tsipursky

Cambridge Analytica provided that legal certification, and Facebook accepted that as sufficient.

When Facebook learned that Cambridge Analytica might have received data from over 50 million Facebook users inappropriately, it asked Cambridge Analytica to provide it with a “legal certification” – in other words, a promise – that it deleted the data.

No wonder that the overconfidence effect – our tendency to be excessively confident in our decision-making – has been found by researchers to harm performance in the workplace, whether by CEOs or ordinary professionals.Ĭonsider Facebook’s excessive confidence as an example. When study subjects said they were 100% confident in their answers, they were wrong 20% of the time. When asked whether they are more, less, or equally skilled compared to the average driver, 93% of Americans report themselves as more skilled. As someone who researches how we can avoid these errors, and consults and speaks for corporations on these topics, I want to show you an effective, research-based approach that you can use to avoid professional and/or business disasters (described in more detail in my Amazon bestseller The Truth-Seeker’s Handbook: A Science-Based Guide). Fortunately, recent research shows that we can easily improve our ability to make better decisions. Knowing about the kinds of well-publicized mistakes made by top corporations helps us understand the kind of mistakes we might be making right now. If the leaders of United, Facebook, and Equifax are vulnerable to these biases, so is everyone reading this article: it’s just that when you experience a disaster due to cognitive biases, it doesn’t make it into the news.

Researchers have found that our brains make systematic and predictable errors – what behavioral scientists call cognitive biases – that lead us to make poor decisions, such as the overconfidence effect, optimism bias, and planning fallacy. You might be surprised to learn that all of these disasters were avoidable. Recent scandals in top corporations – such as Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica data breach, United’s three pet-related debacles scandals in one week, and Equifax discovering an additional 2.4 million data breach victims – all exemplify the kind of thinking errors that lead to disasters.

The Truth-Seeker’s Handbook by Gleb Tsipursky