by Annique Simpson
Understanding the psychology of decision-making can help practitioners increase the impact of and engagement with their PR campaigns. It can also help debias decisions and increase accountability.
You’ll learn:
• Why every PR practitioner should have a basic understanding of psychology
• How cognitive biases affect the choices we make
• Ways to stop biases affecting the decision-making process
If there’s one thing you can set your watch by, it’s that life is full of decisions.
From the mundane (washing dishes); to the unfair (requesting a refund for your 2020 holiday); to the fun (dancing to your favourite song) to the life-changing (buying your first house).
PR and communications specialists can make or break a person’s decision-making process. After all, we’re the ones who identify and present information to our target audiences in the hope that they’ll choose to think, feel and do as we wish.
But with this power comes responsibility. To ensure we use our powers for good, it’s vital that we understand how and why people make good (and bad) decisions.
The psychology of decision-making is an excellent place to start.
Think quick on your feet
A popular decision theory is that our thoughts are governed by two different systems:
- System 1 is fast, automatic, non-conscious, low-effort, emotional.
- System 2 slow, conscious, controlled, high-effort, rational.
System 1 is our default decision-making process. Which works really well with our fast-paced, information-rich, highly social lives.
As System 2 is more effortful, we tend to use it when we’re dealing with new, important, or complex information, like completing a tax form or changing career.
System 1 benefits greatly from mental shortcuts, also known as heuristics. They generally help us make fairly good judgements. However, when they don’t, we can experience systematic errors in our decision-making, also known as cognitive biases.
‘If it walks like a duck…’ – representative bias
Angela is shy, withdrawn, and helpful. She is also meek, has a passion for order and structure, and is not too concerned with the real world.
Based on this scenario, which of these professions do you think Angela is likely to hold?
a) Librarian
b) Nurse
c) Salesperson
If you chose option a, you were probably relying on the representativeness heuristic. That is, you based your decision on the fact that, out of all the listed professions, the description of Angela most resembles (or is representative of) the stereotype of a librarian.
Decision theorists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky found that, when presented with similar scenarios, people tend to choose the most stereotypical option, even when they have information showing other options as more statistically probable.
The representativeness heuristic can be a lifesaver in our line of work. Imagine having to make communications decisions without the use of these handy stereotypes:
• Employees prefer face-to-face events
• Older people don’t use social media
• Legal and HR teams are major blockers for innovative communications
Tricky, isn’t it?
However, by solely focusing on representativeness we could miss diagnostic information pointing to key differences between our stereotypes and the present situation, leading us to make poor decisions. For example, the older people-social media stereotype may lead us to ignore Facebook stats showing higher usage among over-30s.
Communications professor Priscilla Murphy provided examples of how two types of representativeness biases can lead to ‘bad’ PR decisions [1]:
Base rate bias – our tendency to focus on information relating to a specific event and ignore information about the general population (i.e. base rates). PR practitioners may create communication programmes based on subjective ideas about audience members and neglect to determine the proportion of said members in their target audience population.
Illusion of validity – We tend to overestimate our ability to predict a future event if it closely resembles a known event. A PR manager may predict an excellent turnout to a news conference based on a positive response in the past, ignoring other preventative factors. These include the news topic, unseen newsroom events, the company spokesperson or an emerging news story.
‘It’s at the tip of my tongue’ – availability bias
Which was the more common cause of death in the UK in 2018:
a) Asthma
b) Murder
If you chose option b, you’d be wrong but it’s understandable when you consider the availability heuristic. It describes our tendency to evaluate our decisions about the future based on examples, instances or cases that most easily comes to mind.
Some events come to mind quicker than others because they tend to occur frequently, like rainy weather in the UK. Other events are more salient for reasons completely unrelated to their likelihood of occurring. These reasons include:
• They’re easier to think about or imagine
• They happened recently
• They’re highly emotional
Murders tend to get more media coverage than asthma-related deaths, which typically makes them more memorable or ‘available’. So when faced with the question above, we’re more inclined to see murder as a more common cause of death when in fact official UK records show there were 726 reported murders [2] in 2018 compared to 1,422 asthma deaths [3].
While this demonstrates how availability can be a friend to PR specialists (i.e. harnessing the power of celebrity/influencer), it can also be a foe.
Crises are highly memorable – think TSB’s IT meltdown and H&M’s racist monkey hoodie scandal – potentially leading people to view such events as commonplace (even if they aren’t) and take steps to avoid personal risk (i.e. bank or shop elsewhere).
‘It’s your fault’ - attribution bias
Imagine you’ve run a social media campaign about your company’s anti-racism efforts which achieves low engagement.
How would you explain this to your manager?
Humans are naturally motivated to attribute causes to actions and outcomes. It helps us predict future behaviour and events, making it easier for us to navigate the world.
According to one popular framework, we consider three sources of information when explaining behaviour or outcomes:
• Is the action/outcome due to the actor’s disposition or the situation? (internal vs. external)
• Is the cause of the action/outcome permanent or temporary? (stable vs. unstable)
• Does the cause of the action/outcome relate to a specific context or does it apply more broadly? (specific vs. global)
Attribution biases can serve a positive function in our lives. The self-serving bias – our tendency to attribute positive outcomes to internal factors and negative events to external factors – is thought to support psychological wellbeing.
However, attribution biases can also be highly problematic.
‘Unconscious’ bias is a type of attribution bias. It often involves unsupported causal explanations for another person/group’s thoughts, actions or outcomes. These can be positive or negative depending on whether we like or identify with the person/group.
For example, ingroup-outgroup bias refers to our inclination to prefer and make positive evaluations of people who share the same identity or interest (in-group) and negative evaluations of those who don’t (outgroup).
This is a highly replicable finding in psychology – even when people are grouped based on trivial criteria (e.g. painting preferences) – and has been shown to influence various decisions, including employee promotions, choosing a romantic date and awarding public funds to low-income households.
Can we prevent biases?
Sort of. Heuristics typically save us the time and energy we need to survive and thrive. Hence, it takes real effort to prevent or override any resulting biases. But, as we’ve seen, if you want to help others (and yourself) make fair and effective decisions, it’s worth the investment.
Effective ways to debias decisions include:
• Consider alternative explanations, perspectives or possible outcomes before making a decision
• Leave as much time for decision-making as possible
• Seek reliable feedback on decisions as soon as possible to ensure errors are quickly identified, understood and corrected
• Present information in a way that:
I) makes it easy for your audience to evaluate all options.
II) simplifies the decision task for them (see nudge theory)
• Complete training aimed at helping overcome specific biases (e.g. tips for analysing probabilities)
• Record rationales for key decisions and monitor these for patterns that suggest bias
• Establish clear accountability for decisions made
It’s within our gift, as PR and communications professionals, to help people make choices that are best for them and/or our employers/clients. It’s not always easy but thankfully psychology is on hand to help you make the best decision possible.
Sources
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/036381119190050U
Annique Simpson is an award-winning internal communications business partner with four years’ experience spanning property, telecommunications, banking, and healthcare. She holds a BSc in Psychology, a journalism postgraduate diploma, and a CIPR Internal Communications postgraduate certificate.
Her interest areas include change communications, measurement and evaluation, event management and all things content. She has won several awards for her work, including the Moorfields Eye Charity Award for Innovation, Education and Research (2016). She also received the runner-up prize for the CIPR Inside’s Future Leader Award (2017) after only one year in industry.
In 2016, Annique set up the IC Book Club, with the CIPR, to support professional development and networking within the internal communications community. She’s passionate about making the communications industry more inclusive and is founding member of the UK Black Comms Network and a mentor on the 2020 BME PR Pros’ BAME mentoring programme.
An avid writer, Annique writes a monthly blog exploring communications through a psychology lens. She spends the rest of her free time going to music gigs, playing her piano or hanging out on Twitter.
Twitter: @annique_simpson
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/anniquesimpson/
Web: anniquesimpson.com