The Bandwagon Fallacy

 The Bandwagon Fallacy

One of my favorite topics and the most commonly experienced fallacy, The Bandwagon Fallacy. While before we get there, lets differentiate between Biases and Fallacy. A lot of people understand them the same or at least think Biases lead to Fallacy, which is actually not true. Being Aware of both helps you make better decision, but there is a clear difference between them; Fallacies are mistakes of reasoning, as opposed to making mistakes that are factual in nature, however Biases are persistent and widespread psychological tendencies that can be detrimental to objectivity to a decision.

I am going to talk through this Fallacy more in context of leadership roles which involves making critical decisions and how we get trapped in one of the most common fallacy at times. 

Let me start with some questions for you,

# How many times you got this argument to make a decision, "Everyone does it this way, so we should do the same"? Or

# Everyone did it X way, looks a popular way of doing things, must be the right way ! 

Picking the popular choice does not always mean, that you picked the right one :)  

Bandwagon comes from the idea in old times where people use to hop on to the Wagon when they found anything trendy. People would have blinders to reason aspects leading to make right decision and instead use popularity or commonness of a decision to chose on. 

As leaders we develop our brands overtime and one of the key contributors to the brand value we build for ourselves is based on the decision we make. Your decision reflect your ability to deep dive, your courage to make right decisions and your ability to own your decisions. It is really about you being at leadership position vs you being a leader. 

A lot of times when making decisions we know we are not making the right decisions but still we intentionally lean to choose the poplar one, any guesses why we do that (lets bring some real and discomforting answers) -

• The popular choices would have the minimum resistance, so its a easy battle to win. No one challenges you.
• We shy away from taking courageous accountability of the decisions we make, when choosing the  popular one, we can always blame the unknown for the popular choice not proving right :)
• We are in a hurry to get rewarded for our decisions. Time to know the uncommon decision proved right would be long, so one has to wait for the reward for the decision to realize unlike for popular choices reward could come in advance as well ! 

Ah, so many problems with trying to make "right" decisions and no real upside, so why should I take so  much pain ? 

Well the choice is yours, you want to be in control of your destiny or let the popular choice decide your destiny. Its also the mark you as a leader you want to create for yourself. As a true leader the biggest contribution you could make  for your team/organization, is to help make the right decisions. So if i think as a leader myself, i don't have an option and cant afford to have my team & organization suffer of me making a wrong decision.

So how do I avoid getting trapped in The Bandwagon Fallacy ?

Well its not that hard, few simple things can help you avoid the trap and make the right decision -

Be Aware - Being aware is the first and the foremost thing. One should be cautious of not being trapped in the fallacy and challenge the decision making process. 

Remove Blinders -  Often a times you or your team would have blinders in the decision making process.  Subconsciously our mind tries to find easy way out and when it finds a popular choices available it will try to put blinders around you to ignore facts. As a leader remove any blinders you/your team has and bring out facts which are key to decision making.

Focus on Input metric - One simple litmus test to find out you being trapped in the Bandwagon Fallacy is you focusing mostly on the output metric. People trapped in this setup would spend disproportionate time talking of the solution and very little to actually no time talking of the problem the solution was found for :)

Do A Pre-Mortem - One of the best way to break cognitive traps is to play "Disaster". Visualize the decision going wrong and try to work backward from it. Find out reasons why would the decision fail which will in turn help with things which you missed considering while making the decision. 

Remember DECISION making is the ultimate power you get as a leader and not being able to use your power right is the biggest failure. Decisions can prove "right" or "wrong", but the way you make decisions leads you to "success/failure" vs "Disaster" ! 

Choice is yours, put on your Thinking Cap !