By Jordi Cabanas-Danés
Living means being constantly confronted by decisions to take and choices to make. But how ‘good’ are we at making the ‘right’ choice? To keep it short: not that good. Most of us genuinely believe we excel in the risk-assessment process around choices and we think we stick to facts throughout the whole process. However, a large part of the choice-making process happens unconsciously. The reality is that our line of thought is often distorted by a multitude of cognitive biases and filters.
Conditioning factors
Fill in the gap: “If I say how I feel to my supervisors, they will think I’m not … enough”. This is a sentence I constantly and steadily hear during my coaching conversations with PhD candidates, and I can tell you that the gap is often filled in by adjectives such as “professional”, “capable”, “resilient”, but in almost all cases with an implicit underlying “worth it”. We could spend hours trying to label the cognitive biases involved in this “what if” scenario risk-assessment process and we would probably not be even close to covering all the possibilities and nuances.
There are certain conditioning factors that might set the tone for relying on specific biases. In the example above, one conditioning factor could be our perception towards working in a highly hierarchical setting, where we feel dependent of our supervisors. This experienced dependency can take many forms, ranging from feeling there’s no room to disagree on vision or plan to not being able to be open about how you feel towards specific situations. Don’t get me wrong, I am not here to tell you that these fears/worries are not valid. Of course they are! They might even be true in many cases. My point is that we should challenge ourselves to think beyond our biases. For all we know, in this given case and at any given point, the statement “If I say how I feel to my supervisors, they will think I’m assertive and standing up for myself” is equally possible. Of course this challenge is bigger when hundreds of other biases and filters exist so we don’t even consider those other scenario’s, and rather be convinced of the following: “but I know my supervisors best and they would never consider me being assertive for sharing how I feel.”
Our comfort zone
Why do we hold to those biases and convictions then? Well, I can think of at least two reasons. The first one: to save time and energy. If every single decision we were to make would require awareness of our biases and evaluating all possibilities in a judgement-free way, that would not be very practical. Probably this is also the biological function of distort thinking. The second one, and perhaps a more philosophical one, is that often our first line of thought will be a familiar one, one which we feel comfortable with. It may feel safer and easier to think that our supervisors won’t be open to hearing about our feelings. So the status quo is our comfort zone. But at what price? At the price of not even exploring a way that could improve your well-being or even the quality of your work by addressing the current frustrations in an open and honest way.
What are the alternatives?
Cognitive biases inevitably exist, but there is a way to lessen their influence on our choice-making process: starting the process from your needs instead of your fears. If you take your needs as a starting point, you hamper the effect of your fears and there is more room to consider different possible outcomes of the decision you’re about to make. And needless to say: sticking to the fact the status quo will probably not change anything. So if you want to change the current reality, for instance improving the process of your PhD trajectory, it is necessary to share your frustrations, feelings and needs with the parties involved. Starting the decision process from your needs instead of your fears requires courage and compassion, and it may not always lead to your preferred outcome, but as Albert Einstein once said: “Failure is success in progress”.
Do you recognize yourself in this article? You might find Blog 6: Two Myths and One Truth about Choices also interesting. The PhD advisors are here for you. Get in touch with us for a consultation (phdadvisor@amsterdamumc.nl).