Doubt Avoidance Bias

Your brain wants you to make decisions fast.

Not good decisions. Not thoughtful decisions. Just fast ones. This made perfect sense when you were running from predators on the savannah. It makes considerably less sense when you’re choosing a career, ending a relationship, or deciding whether to send that angry email.

This is called Doubt Avoidance Bias — what investor Charlie Munger, who first named the tendency, called ‘doubt-avoidance tendency’ — and it’s one of the most powerful ways your brain sabotages your decision-making without you even noticing.

The Survival Mechanism That’s Sabotaging You

Our minds are programmed to act quickly because it’s a basic survival mechanism. When you’re threatened, you need to act immediately. Often in times of stress, you act so quickly that it’s almost an unconscious response designed to limit any unnecessary delay.

Doubt and hesitation aren’t good things when you’re in danger. When self-preservation is high on the list of priorities, you need to think quickly. This is the origin of Doubt Avoidance Bias.

Research on the neuroscience of decision-making shows that stress activates the amygdala and reduces activity in the prefrontal cortex, leading to faster but less rational decisions (Arnsten, 2009). Your brain literally switches from ‘think mode’ to ‘survive mode,’ and once that happens, doubt becomes the enemy.

Our self-preservation instincts mean we’re hard-wired to avoid doubt. This bias is preprogrammed in our brains. It affects our decision-making much more when we’re stressed and under pressure because it’s at these times that our decision-making becomes even quicker and more instinctive.

The trouble is that decisions affected by Doubt Avoidance Bias can be rushed, habitual, based on emotion, and made to avoid doubt rather than from an analysis of the facts. You’re not making decisions. You’re just reacting.

When the Bias Takes Over

When you’re outside your comfort zone, stressed, threatened, or when emotions are charged, you’re at the mercy of Doubt Avoidance Bias. It’s almost like this bias turns up the dial for you to make quicker and quicker decisions and avoid doubt when your back’s against the wall.

There will be times when Doubt Avoidance Bias takes over no matter what you do. This is why prior training in high-stress situations makes your decision-making more effective. When you’re really stressed, ingrained behaviours, experience, and training kick in. The quality of your response is typically dependent on these factors.

I’ve done this type of training in Advanced Trauma Life Support (ATLS) exercises, running high-stress scenarios and simulations with actors posing as patients so you learn to make the right decisions in real life-and-death clinical situations when the stakes can’t be higher.

The military and police do weapon drills and live-fire exercises. Pilots spend time in simulators running through all eventualities that need correct decisions to be made quickly. When the training is there, it kicks in when Doubt Avoidance Bias takes effect. When the stakes are high, you know what to do without even thinking, and you just do what you need to do.

Studies on expertise show that experts process information faster and more accurately under pressure because they’ve built automated response patterns through deliberate practice (Ericsson & Lehmann, 1996). Their ‘fast thinking’ is informed by thousands of hours of training. Yours might just be panic.

For me, I still have vivid memories of intubating patients, putting in chest drains and central lines in times when success and failure meant life and death. It was at these times that I responded instinctively and just did what needed to be done as Doubt Avoidance Bias made me react, and I relied on training, practised technique, and memorised protocols.

The Problem Outside Life-and-Death Situations

Outside of life-and-death situations, we can still feel the effect of Doubt Avoidance Bias. Often, as is usually the case, we don’t appreciate the effect it’s having on our decisions.

Yet in reality, short of a life-and-death situation, there’s nothing wrong with a little bit of doubt. Most of the time in life, you do have time. You can slow down. You can stop yourself from being too rash in the decisions you make.

Research on decision quality shows that even brief pauses for reflection can significantly improve outcomes in non-urgent situations (Kahneman, 2011). Your brain just needs permission to stop and think.

Doubt Avoidance Bias is also one of the reasons why you can get into the habit of making the same mistakes again and again. Without effective training in high-stress situations, you tend to go back to previous practice behaviours and responses. Instinctively, you often just do what you’ve done before, and that’s not always the right thing to do.

The Repeated Mistake Pattern

If you feel that you don’t make good decisions under pressure, it’s time you looked at those decisions again and worked out how you could respond differently. Run visualisations of doing things right. Play out a good response. In doing so, you can train yourself to react differently when in that situation again.

Because if you don’t put in the effort to do this, you’re likely to just repeat the same mistakes again and again. Studies on habit formation show that under stress, people default to their most practised responses, even when those responses are maladaptive (Wood & Neal, 2007).

I had a patient, Michael, who would panic every time he had to speak in meetings. He’d prepare brilliantly, then freeze and defer to others when the moment came. This happened for two years. Same situation, same response, same disappointment.

When we worked together, we didn’t focus on his anxiety. We focused on training a new response. We practised the moment of stress repeatedly until he had a different automatic pattern. It wasn’t magic. It was deliberate practice overriding Doubt Avoidance Bias.

Cherishing Doubt

Doubt can almost be painful. It’s such an un-instinctual thing. But cherish those times. Look for them. Doubt has probably just stopped you from making a bad decision.

Doubt shows cognitive awareness. It means you need to think about something. Doubt allows for your rational mind to kick in and for you to take stock of the situation and make better choices.

Research on metacognition shows that people who are aware of their uncertainty make better decisions than those who are overconfident (Dunning et al., 2004). Doubt is your brain saying, ‘Wait, let me think about this properly.’ Listen to it.

Sometimes you need to question why you’re doing things. You need to stop doing the same old ways, those things that keep getting you into trouble, and instead start doing what’s right.

You can often put things off and create some space to think rather than rushing in with poor decisions. If that decision can wait, you can research that topic, give yourself some time, and often you’ll see other options you would never have considered without the pause.

Making Changes Outside Your Comfort Zone

Your goal should always be to make the right decision and to act appropriately in any situation rather than react inappropriately just to avoid doubt. In stressful times, your responses are influenced by Doubt Avoidance Bias. The desired response often only comes with the necessary preparation and training.

Making changes in your life takes you well outside of your comfort zone. Outside of your comfort zone, you naturally become much more prone to Doubt Avoidance Bias too.

Doubt Avoidance Bias gives you a false sense of confidence. Being blindly confident and doing the wrong things can be dangerous. Studies on overconfidence show it’s associated with poorer outcomes in fields ranging from finance to medicine (Moore & Healy, 2008).

A lot of cognitive debiasing work helps people become conscious of ways their thinking is being distorted. Fundamentally, this allows them to reconsider the decisions they’re about to make or to understand and prevent recurrent thinking patterns that are causing poor behaviours in their lives.

Think of it like this: if you learn how to think better, you can build much more effective mental circuits in your brain. You can see new choices of action. You can do the right thing rather than relying on old patterns of behaviour.

What You Need to Do

Your destiny is self-determined by the decisions you make. But if you don’t watch out, your destiny can also be predetermined by you instinctively making those poor mistakes again and again.

There are several things you need to do to mitigate against Doubt Avoidance Bias. Practice, experience, and training are essential to almost everything you do in life. Positive visualisation helps by rehearsing better patterns of thinking and behaviour that are ready when needed.

Bringing a little stress, change, and unknown into your life takes you just outside your comfort zone, which is a great place to be to keep you mentally alert and on your toes rather than getting stuck in old patterns.

Reflective practice is key to preventing poor responses from happening again. You can consciously pre-programme choices and responses with training that are more desirable rather than relying on automatic poor responses you’ve done before.

Doubt Avoidance Bias happens like many other cognitive biases without you knowing it’s having an effect on your thinking. The pressure to make a decision takes over and you react even when you don’t need to. Get yourself ready for what you need to do. Prepare what you’re going to do. And if you don’t really need to make a decision, why not sleep on it?

When doubt appears, don’t fight it. Use it. It’s your brain giving you permission to think.

Further reading

• Munger, C. T. (1995). The Psychology of Human Misjudgment. Harvard University speech.
• Arnsten, A. F. (2009). Stress signalling pathways that impair prefrontal cortex structure and function. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 10(6), 410–422.
• Schwabe, L., & Wolf, O. T. (2009). Stress prompts habit behavior in humans. Journal of Neuroscience, 29(22), 7191–7198.
• Ericsson, K. A., & Lehmann, A. C. (1996). Expert and exceptional performance: Evidence of maximal adaptation to task constraints. Annual Review of Psychology, 47(1), 273–305.
• Dunning, D., Heath, C., & Suls, J. M. (2004). Flawed self-assessment: Implications for health, education, and the workplace. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 5(3), 69–106.