The Cognitive Shortcut That Clouds Decision-Making

Merely repeating false claims increases their believability, leaving business leaders vulnerable to basing decisions on misinformation. Here are four strategies to prevent this.

- JONAS DE KEERSMAECKER, KATHARINA SCHMID, NADIA BRASHIER, AND CHRISTIAN UNKELBACH

Meetings are as effective over Zoom as they are face-to-face. A four-day workweek makes employees more productive. Few complaints means customers are happy. Innovation requires disruption.

Business leaders regularly confront these and similar claims. But what makes people believe that they are true? And, more critically, how do such claims affect strategic decisions?

We live in a time of unprecedented access to information that’s available anytime and anywhere. Even when we don’t actively seek out opinions, reviews, and social media posts, we are constantly subjected to them. Simply processing all of this information is difficult enough, but there’s another, more serious problem: Not all of it is accurate, and some is outright false. Even more worrying is that when inaccurate or wrong information is repeated, an illusion of truth occurs: People believe repeated information to be true — even when it is not.

Misinformation and disinformation are hardly new. They arguably have been impairing decision-making for as long as organizations have existed. However, managers today contend with incorrect and unreliable information at an unparalleled scale. The problem is particularly acute for Big Tech companies like Facebook, Google, and Twitter because of the broad societal effects of misinformation on the platforms. A recent study of the most-viewed YouTube videos on the COVID-19 pandemic found that 19 out of 69 contained nonfactual information, and the videos that included misinformation had been viewed more than 62 million times.