Information Bias

One of the general underlying trends for the last few chapters has been about taking action (or the lack of it).

This problem is confounded because often we don’t realise this is what we need to do, or what it is we have to do. There’s another bias that needs to be discussed with this in mind, one that’s very commonly seen, one that’s affected most of us from time to time.

This bias is called information bias.

Information bias is the tendency to seek information when it doesn’t actually change what you’d do with it. It’s what happens when we overthink things, when we deliberately look for information to confirm our inaction, or when too much information just overloads our ability to process it and make a decision.

To be clear before I go any further: asking questions before a medical procedure is entirely reasonable, and a good doctor should always make time for that. What I’m describing here isn’t about the value of being informed, which is real and important. It’s about the specific point where gathering more information stops helping you decide and starts becoming a way of avoiding the decision altogether.

I remember a patient who came in for a simple routine operation under local anaesthetic. He had with him a pile of printouts and articles he’d found that he wanted to discuss before the operation. There wasn’t time in that appointment to work through everything he’d brought, so I asked him to come back once he’d had a chance to go through it properly with better sources, and we booked more time to talk it through together.

When he came back, he’d found an even bigger pile of printouts and articles, and was still unsure what to do. We talked it through as best we could, but in the end he wanted more time to think, and the procedure was rebooked.

That was several years ago. He still hasn’t had the procedure, and I still don’t know if that’s the right decision for him or not. What I do know is that at some point, the search for more information had stopped being about making a better decision, and had become a way of never quite having to make one.

More information is not always better. Sometimes less information can help us make better choices. Too much information can lead to poor decisions or lead us to not being able to make a decision at all.

Unfortunately, in life, there’s not always a clear picture. We certainly don’t get an instruction manual. The key with information is knowing enough, not everything. Knowing what you need to know to make the decision is what’s really important.

This is where experience and training come in. Simple rules of thumb, when faced with problems, can focus on what to do when faced with doubt and can avoid the indecision we can get with information overload. Often, by sticking to basic principles, you can get better and safer results without knowing it all.

The internet is our connection to the age of information we live in today. Through fake news, search engine rankings, and deliberate misinformation, the result is everything we see and hear through this media stream is in some way filtered and biased. Don’t believe everything you read in the papers, but certainly don’t believe everything you read on the internet either.

Nobody is ever going to be one hundred percent certain about anything they do. I’ve seen academics with no common sense. I’ve seen people frozen by too much knowledge, unable to make decisions and take action.

The key to avoiding information bias is to be informed rather than being overloaded by all of the information you can find.

There’s a limit to what you need to know before information bias starts to hold you back. There are going to be some things you’ll learn by taking action. Experience is only gained by doing something and learning from it.

Perhaps you already know what it is you want to do. So ask yourself this. How much more do you really need to know before you get started?

I had a patient, call him Andrew, who wanted to start a business. He’d been planning it for three years. Reading books. Taking courses. Researching the market. Analysing competitors. Building spreadsheets. Creating business plans.

“When are you launching?” I asked him.

“Soon. I just need to understand a few more things first.”

“Like what?”

“Like how to handle the tax situation if I scale to multiple countries. And the legal implications of different corporate structures. And the optimal marketing spend allocation across different channels.”

“Are you selling anything yet?”

“No, but I will once I’ve figured all this out.”

Two years later, he’s still planning. Still researching. Still waiting until he knows enough. Meanwhile, three of his friends started similar businesses with a fraction of the knowledge, learned as they went, and are now profitable.

That’s information bias. The belief that you need to know more before you can act, when the truth is that action is often the only way to know what you actually need to know.

Information bias feels productive. You’re doing something. You’re learning. You’re preparing. You’re being responsible and thorough. But you’re not actually making progress. You’re making yourself feel better about not taking action by convincing yourself you’re not ready yet.

The reality is you’ll never feel completely ready. There will always be more to learn, more to understand, more information you don’t have. If you wait until you have all the information, until you’re completely certain, until there’s no risk, you’ll wait forever.

This doesn’t mean act recklessly. It doesn’t mean ignore important information. It means recognise when you have enough to make a reasonable decision, then make it. It means understand that some knowledge only comes from experience, not research.

Think about learning to drive. You can read every manual, watch every tutorial, understand every rule, know the theory perfectly. But you won’t actually know how to drive until you get in a car and drive. The knowledge you need to be a competent driver, the knowledge that actually matters, only comes from doing it.

Information bias convinces you that you can learn to drive by reading more books about driving. That’s not how it works. That’s never how it works.

The internet makes this worse. Infinite information available instantly. For any decision you want to make, there are thousands of articles, hundreds of studies, millions of opinions. You could spend years researching and never run out of new information.

But at some point, more information stops helping and starts hindering. At some point, you know enough to decide. The question is whether you’re willing to decide with imperfect information, or whether you’re going to keep researching as a way of avoiding the decision.

I see this with health decisions constantly. People research symptoms endlessly, becoming experts in rare conditions they almost certainly don’t have, paralysed by the vast array of possibilities. What they actually need is to see a doctor, get examined, get a diagnosis. But that would mean moving from research to action, and action means facing reality rather than staying safely in the world of possibility.

Getting a second opinion, when something significant is at stake, is a perfectly reasonable thing to do, and it’s a right you have as a patient. Where information bias creeps in is further along than that, when you find yourself seeking a third opinion, then a fourth, not because the earlier ones were unclear, but because part of you is hoping someone will eventually tell you what you want to hear, or because a decision based on one clear opinion feels too risky even when ten opinions would all say the same thing.

Here’s the truth about information and decisions. You don’t need certainty. You need enough information to make a reasonable decision, then you need to make it. You can always adjust later based on new information. But you can’t adjust if you never start.

So ask yourself, what decision am I avoiding by seeking more information? What am I really afraid of? Is it genuinely that I don’t know enough, or is it that I don’t want to commit to a choice?

Because information bias isn’t about knowledge. It’s about fear dressed up as thoroughness. It’s about avoiding responsibility for a decision by convincing yourself you’re not ready to make one.

Perhaps you already know what you need to do. Perhaps you’ve known for a while. Perhaps all this research, all this information gathering, all this preparation, is just a sophisticated form of procrastination.

How much more do you really need to know before you get started?

The answer, for most people, is nothing. You know enough. You’ve always known enough. You’re just scared to act on what you know.

And no amount of additional information is going to fix that.

Further reading

• Baron, J., Beattie, J., & Hershey, J. C. (1988). Heuristics and biases in diagnostic reasoning: II. Congruence, information, and certainty. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 42(1), 88-110.
• Iyengar, S. S., & Lepper, M. R. (2000). When choice is demotivating: Can one desire too much of a good thing? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 79(6), 995-1006.
• Gigerenzer, G., & Todd, P. M. (1999). Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart. Oxford University Press.
• Schwartz, B. (2004). The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less. Harper Perennial.
• Levitin, D. J. (2014). The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload. Dutton.