You're About to Make a Terrible Mistake: How Biases Distort Decision-Making and What You Can Do to Fight Them

“A wise leader, therefore, does not see herself as someone who simply makes sound decisions; because she realizes she can never, on her own, be an optimal decision maker, she views herself as a decision architect in charge of designing her organization’s decision-making processes.”

“In theory, the scientific method should guard against the risk of confirmation bias. If, for example, we are testing a new drug, our experiment should not aim to confirm the hypothesis that the treatment works. Instead, we should test the “null hypothesis” that the drug has no effect. When the results allow for rejecting this null hypothesis with sufficient probability, the alternative hypothesis—that the drug has an effect—is plausible, and the conclusion of the study is positive. On paper, the process of scientific discovery goes against our natural instincts: it seeks to disprove an initial hypothesis.”