Imagine this: you are looking for a new supplier for your company. You've found two potential candidates. The first supplier has an impressive website full of rave customer reviews. The second supplier is new to the market and has very little online feedback. Despite the fact that the second supplier may be better in price and quality, you'll probably still go with the first option. Why? This is a classic example of attentional bias, a psychological bias that can greatly influence our decision-making. In this article, we explore how attentional bias works, how it can affect your business decisions and, more importantly, how you can recognize this bias and use it to your advantage.
What is attentional bias?
Attentional bias describes our tendency to focus on more emotionally dominant stimuli, while ignoring other relevant data in the process. This often happens automatically and unconsciously (Bar-Haim, Lamy, Pergamin, Bakermans-Kranenburg & van IJzendoorn, 2007).
There are all kinds of factors that can affect our indonesia mobile number code focus, both external (e.g., danger) and internal (e.g., hunger). The factors that affect us emotionally get more attention. Because we can only keep our attention there for a certain amount of time, more focus may go to one at the expense of another. We also can only give our attention to a limited number of things at a time. We may make these things more important than they are, which can create tunnel vision. By thinking about them a lot, they start to become more important in our minds.
How does attentional bias arise?
Evolutionarily, attentional bias can be well explained. Namely, it provides evolutionary advantages when your focus is limited. Focusing on finding food and avoiding danger (such as wild animals) increased our chances of survival in prehistoric times (Tapper, Pothos & Lawrence, 2010).
This is thankfully no longer applicable, as we can just buy our food at the store and we don't have to protect our village ourselves, but the attentional bias is still in our genes.