This informal CPD article, ‘The Role of Cognitive Bias in Learning Design’, was provided by iAM Learning, who are transforming the way your workforce trains and retains, using high-end animation, lovable characters and captivating stories to make even the most serious subjects appealing and unforgettable.
Nadia is a seasoned sales manager, and she’s being encouraged to take yet another training session. Apparently, a ‘big brain’ in L&D has devised a new sales approach. The thing is, she knows it’ll fail, despite the evidence presented. “This just won’t work with my clients.”
She doesn’t realise it, but this is confirmation bias in action. She’s favouring information that supports her beliefs and dismisses what doesn’t. If she caught her bias, she might reconsider and try the proposed new method.
Understanding cognitive biases
It’s not just confirmation bias that gets in the way of learning, though. Our brains are full of time-saving shortcuts called cognitive biases. They can make or break a learning experience. Recency bias, for example. Ask Nadia to recall last month’s training session and she might remember a portion of it crystal clear. But the rest? Well, that’s a bit fuzzy.
Then, there are other cognitive biases such as anchoring bias, where Nadia might be too fixated on her current sales as a benchmark. “I’m already hitting my targets, why should I change?”. There’s the Dunning-Kruger Effect, where Nadia overestimates her expertise and underestimates what she could learn.
Other cognitive biases include:
Sunk cost fallacy: Nadia believes she’s spent a good deal of time perfecting her current approach and feels it’d be a ‘waste’ to change it.
Negativity bias: Nadia once had a bad experience with a new training approach, it was a disaster, so she feels this will be the same.
Bandwagon effect: If Nadia’s colleagues are just as sceptical about the new approach, she may be more likely to dismiss the training too.
Let’s take a deeper look at how these mental shortcuts can affect learning, and crucially, what we can do about them. Biases like these aren’t just theoretical concepts. They exist in us all and can have real impacts on learning outcomes. For example:
- A team leader might dismiss new management techniques because “That’s just not how we do things here” (Status quo bias).
- An employee might overestimate their expertise and value after they’ve had just one successful project (Overconfidence bias).
- Learners might struggle to apply new training in real-life situations because the examples given during training weren’t relevant to their everyday work (availability bias).
Cognitive biases in learning design can distort how information is processed, leading to poor decision-making and an ineffective learning experience. They can reinforce misconceptions, hinder your critical thinking skills and reduce the effectiveness of learning outcomes.
Practical tips for learning design
The good news is that there are practical ways to design learning that gets around these biases.
1. Don’t cram learning into one long and intense session. Instead, spread it out into smaller sessions. It’ll help combat recency bias, and lead to higher retention and better application of what has been learned.
2. Ask learners to write down their current approaches. Then tailor your content to gently challenge these approaches throughout the training. This can lead to better buy-in to new concepts.
3. Use examples from different contexts to help learners spot their own biases. Sometimes it’s easier to spot biases when they aren’t so close to home, but spotting them leads to challenging this behaviour when it comes to applying it in their own jobs.
4. Create a safe space where learners can mess up without fear. This helps tackle overconfidence bias. Perhaps try a role-play scenario during training that shows getting things wrong as part of the process?
5. Encourage employees to take unconscious bias training, so they can learn to spot negative biases in their tracks.
Nadia’s story shows how cognitive biases can create roadblocks in learning. Whether it’s her confirmation bias helping her dismiss new ideas, or the sunk cost fallacy keeping her tangled up in old methods, these mental shortcuts affect how she absorbs and uses new information. And as a result, she’ll never grow as a person or employee, and those targets she’s currently hitting? Well, they may seem much further away in the near future.
Don’t be like Nadia. Design training that acknowledges these biases – spreading out learning, challenging assumptions gently, using various examples and creating safe spaces to practice (and fail). Doing so will result in helping learners like Nadia move past their biases and embrace new ways of working. We can’t eliminate these biases, but we can work with them smartly. When we do, we turn these potential barriers to learning into a roadmap for growth.
We hope this article was helpful. For more information from iAM Learning, please visit their CPD Member Directory page. Alternatively, you can go to the CPD Industry Hubs for more articles, courses and events relevant to your Continuing Professional Development requirements.
