Decision Making and Risk — Page 306, Lesson 501

Let’s talk about the errors, sources, and limits that can creep into the decision-making process. I want to walk you through each one, because recognising them is the first step to avoiding them. First, confirmation bias. This is the tendency to look for evidence that supports your current hypothesis, while ignoring evidence that contradicts it. The best way to avoid it is to deliberately search for information that would falsify your hypothesis — that is, prove it wrong — rather than only looking for things that confirm it. This is covered in more detail in Chapter 8 of your book. Next, probability. A pilot is heavily influenced by how likely an event is. For example, imagine you hear a loud bang on take-off. It could be a tyre burst, a bird strike, or an engine failure. The most probable cause of a loud noise at that stage is a burst tyre. So, pilots may automatically start carrying out the initial drills for a tyre burst, because that’s the most likely scenario. The risk is that you lock onto the most probable cause and miss a less probable but more dangerous one. Then there’s saliency. People tend to focus most heavily on cues that are physically salient — things that are loud, bright, recent, centrally visible, or easy to interpret. The danger is that vital information that is not salient — quiet, dim, off to the side, or harder to interpret — may be completely overlooked. Overconfidence is another major error. An overconfidence in your own personal skill or decision-making ability has been the direct cause of many bad airborne decisions. A good aviator, however experienced, is the first to admit that there is always much to learn. Overconfidence breeds complacency. Hand-in-hand with complacency comes a loss of motivation to practise or learn. When that happens, performance can only deteriorate. This is sometimes known as the “Deterioration Effect”. The book points out that the higher accident rate for general aviation pilots with between 1,000 and 3,000 flying hours, compared with those who are less experienced, is often explained by this effect. Those pilots have enough hours to feel confident, but not enough to have fully internalised their limits. Fatigue and overload both seriously affect decision making. When you’re tired or overwhelmed, your ability to weigh options and make sound judgements drops significantly. Finally, denial. This is a common aspect of human attitude when exposed to risk. Denial can manifest itself in several behavioural patterns. Let me list them: - Procrastination: “I’ll continue to fly on for a little longer and then decide.” - Rationalization: “It’ll all work out just fine.” - Hope and desires: “It’s bound to clear on the other side of these hills.” - Refusal to admit: “It’s not like that, and anyway it can’t happen to me.” - Status and reputation: “I’m just not going to be beaten.” - Refusal to review: “It worked last time in roughly the same situation.” Each of these is a form of denial — a refusal to accept, admit, confront, change, or decide. Denial has been the cause of many accidents. It is fundamental that, in order for a good decision to be reached, the real situation is analysed, confronted, and assessed. Not the one you wish were true. So, to sum up: confirmation bias, probability, saliency, overconfidence, fatigue/overload, and denial — these are the key errors and limits in the decision-making process. Recognising them in yourself and your crew is part of building good judgement.