The representativeness bias: when an isolated example becomes a generality

After months of hard work, you are finally ready to present your case to your client. Due to lockdown, the meeting will be held by videoconference... You receive the invitation from your client with the link to the video conference — Horror, it does not use the video tools you are used to, but a complicated and unstable software... You recognize it well: you discovered this tool during a presentation that was punctuated by technical bugs, and ended with a dissatisfied customer and a lost contract. Cruelty of Fate: So Much Work, and a Fiasco Ahead

What's Going On In Your Head: The Representativeness Bias

When you received this invitation, your brain looked for information that would allow it to form a judgment about your ability to handle this new situation (Will I be able to give this presentation when the time comes?). However, theAvailability heuristic Makes you base your judgment on the information most immediately available in memory: here, you were marked by the name of this tool, which actually you of this failed presentation. This information stood out to you because it is very close to your future situation: an important presentation, to a customer, by video, with the same tool.

The soil was ideal for germinating the Representativeness bias, which pushes you to make specific cases or examples a generality. Rather than considering this isolated event as such, you adopted it as a frame of reference for judging your situation. This ability to connect past and future situations is what allows you to capitalize on your experiences: unfortunately, your brain was overzealous.

You Didn't Need More to Reduce Your Feeling of Personal Effectiveness (SEP): that is, to what extent do you feel “capable of”. Conceptualized by Albert Bandura, professor of psychology at Stanford, SEP is, among other things, impacted by personal experiences. With a personal experience skewed through representativeness (the only meeting you attended with this tool failed), your SEP is too weak, not letting you even imagine taking action. In other words, you've already decided that the meeting would be a failure before you even thought about what you should do to make it a success.

The representativeness bias pushes you to make judgments that have no probabilistic justification, and to turn a drop into an ocean. Put Logic Back on Your Side by Rationalizing the Obstacles That Demotivate You — Which Will Allow You to Better Bypass Them.

Les Nudges To the Rescue: Mental Contrast

Imagine that a princess is coming to your rescue! But Gabriele Oettingen is above all a psychologist, and invented the Mental Contrast. Mental contrast works in 2 simple steps: 1) Identify obstacles to action to make them aware; 2) plan to overcome these difficulties in a real situation.

Instead of taking it for granted that your presentation will not go well, List all the reasons why it could be a failure

Why ? By anticipating your difficulties, you make them real: from irrational fears, they become concrete obstacles, which you can prepare to solve. Of course, the exercise allows you to anticipate and prepare yourself. And in addition, by imagining yourself overcoming an obstacle, you increase your Sense of Personal Effectiveness!

How ? Focus on the elements that you control (ex: maintaining attention with a visual and clear medium) or that you can at least bypass (ex: prepare an email with the support, in case you are unable to share your screen).

Once all your difficulties have been written down, and therefore externalized, you will already feel more clear: you will be in better conditions to prepare, point by point, how you would get around each of these obstacles.

‍