How to recognise cognitive bias in decision-making

Most people like to think their decisions are driven by evidence and clear logic. In reality, they are shaped by a mix of conscious reasoning, subconscious pattern recognition, and emotional signals that often emerge before we can fully explain them.

“There is no evidence that human beings make decisions in a purely rational way,” says Dr Travis Kemp, organisational psychologist and executive coach. Instead, emotion is always part of the equation, shaping and sometimes distorting judgement.

“When you look at how we are wired and the number of cognitive biases we operate with, it becomes clear that decision-making is far more complex than pure rational analysis,” he says.

This creates a tension for how people think about decision-making: while professionals value logic and data, much of what drives choice happens outside conscious awareness.

More than 20 years ago, research from Harvard Business School argued that around 95 per cent of cognition occurs outside conscious awareness. More recent information from the Stanford Graduate School of Business reinforces this idea, suggesting that emotional signals play an important role in complex decision-making, and that intuition can be a useful guide when tested against evidence.

If much of what shapes professional choice happens outside conscious awareness, and emotion and intuition are always operating alongside logic, how does one make better decisions?

Balancing intuition and evidence

One of the key risks in decision-making is the tendency to seek out information that supports what we already believe, while discounting evidence that challenges it. In practice, this means people can unconsciously shape data to fit a preferred narrative rather than using it to genuinely test a decision.

What appears to be rigorous analysis can, in reality, become post-hoc justification, says workplace expert and author Dr Michelle Gibbings.

“We like to think that we look at the data, weigh up the options and then choose the best path forward,” Gibbings says. “But in practice, it often works the other way around. We make a decision first, shaped by emotion, instinct or pressure, and then look for data to support it.”

This bias does not only affect how we interpret data, it also shapes how we interpret our own intuition. Mostly dismissed as a “gut feeling”, intuition is far from irrational. More often, it reflects the that the brain has rapidly processed patterns built through experience — long before we can articulate the thought.

That does not mean intuition is unreliable. In fact, it can become more refined over time. With expertise and repeated exposure, people develop the ability to recognise patterns quickly and sense when something is not quite right, says Gibbings.

“Intuition is based on experience, and you can hone and develop it through your expertise and that sense that something is not right. It prompts you to examine assumptions, work out what you are missing, and consider what you are not hearing or seeing. It is your brain recognising patterns and identifying something before you are able to fully articulate it,” she says.

However, research suggests intuition is only dependable under specific conditions, according to the work of Daniel Kahneman and Gary Klein, who outline two critical factors that Gibbings recounts.

“The first is that the environment must be stable and predictable enough for meaningful patterns to exist. The second is that the decision-maker must have had repeated experience and clear feedback from which to learn.”

When these conditions are absent, intuition becomes far less reliable and more vulnerable to bias, overconfidence or misinterpretation, Kahneman and Klein’s research suggests.

Even highly experienced leaders are not immune. Stress, fatigue, personal bias and incomplete information can all distort judgement. What feels like intuition may sometimes be anxiety, urgency or a desire for certainty.

For that reason, intuition is most valuable as a starting point rather than a final answer, Kemp says.

“Intuition can signal where attention should be directed. It can raise questions, identify risks or highlight opportunities. But it still requires validation. The most effective decision-makers treat intuition as a hypothesis to be tested rather than a conclusion to be defended.”

Understanding the triggers

Effective decision-makers are not those who remove emotion from the process, but those who understand how it influences them, Kemp says. “The overarching point to keep in mind is that, regardless of how rational or quantitative we believe our problem-solving approach to be, there will always be a confounding variable in the form of emotion.”

For leaders and managers, the key is to understand what the emotion is, then recognise how it is being triggered or stimulated. For professionals in data-driven fields, there are ways to bring an emotional dimension into decision-making in a constructive way and allow its influence to be recognised, rather than ignored.

“There is now much more openness to discussing emotion and the broader context influencing a decision,” Kemp says. “It is increasingly recognised that decision-making is not purely driven by numbers and analysis, even in highly quantitative environments.”

One way to make this more acceptable is to normalise it by creating space to talk about emotions openly within decision-making processes. “It also helps to maintain curiosity rather than judgement, framing it as part of how we make decisions together, rather than as a flaw in reasoning,” he says.

“Over time, the goal is to build awareness of these patterns earlier in the problem-solving process. From there, the focus shifts to managing and, where appropriate, compartmentalising those emotional responses within the decision-making cycle, so they inform judgement without unintentionally driving it.”

 

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