Johnnie - just been reading Ricardo Semler - Maverick. In that there are a number of times when the FAE emerges as a reason to maintain hierarchical command and control approach to business with in the organisation i.e. workers turn up late because they are lazy and therefore need to clock in and out, rather than trusting them. Could it be that social rather than biological forces at work here? If we had to take into account so much information to make simple decisions then we would end up with overload?

Isn't that the point of (traditional) branding i.e. to provide a shortcut to decision making for consumers of products? If we had to take into account such context wouldn't it completely slow down all our decision making processes?

I am not agreeing its correct to do this BTW rather suggesting that most people don't actively think about context but rather respond almost instictively based upon previous experience and that this is what 'branding' exploits?

P.S. Semler mentions people should not look to the past or the future but focus on the present, the now - not unlike some of the things you have been saying.

Isn't FAE the result of us wanting to deny the obvious: Shit happens for reasons we often didn't see coming, usually because our heads were down working on some "officially important" trifle Two choices, embodied in a phrase some wise person once sent me: When you come to the edge of all things that you know, you must believe one of two things: There will be earth on which to stand, or you wil be given wings to fly.

*Knowing* in this instance is less about encycopaedic knowledge of facts but more understanding what people inherently want. Business policies and systems don't take this fundamental man-hole into account, or rather, they create an even more dangerous one by implying that more "linear" rules are the answer. Customer and employee understanding begin at the beginnning, with people understanding. Which as we know, managers don't learn in B-school. There's your invisible 90% of the iceberg, Johnnie. But not unknowable.

To follow on the earlier theme of LUV's success, I give you JetBlue's David Neeleman from October's Chief Executive magazine: "When I get treated poorly, it really pisses me off. Then it pisses me off that it pisses me off."

See, Neeleman knows that if he can get his people to agree on the fundamental injustice of bad service, of "pissing people off," then they can use that simple, yet firmly held idea, and act nimble in ways that make obvious sense to JetBlue's mission, the same way Kelleher said, "If we're not enjoying ourselves, what's the point?"

Thanks for the comments chaps. Paul you're right about us needing short cuts. I'm gonna post a bit more this morning prompted by this.

And fouro, you know I agree about the danger of rules and rigidity...

"As the authors point out, we're good at blaming other people's behaviour on their character, whilst excusing our own faults because of the difficult circumstances we work in."

This is actually more of a mix of the "Actor/Observer Bias", in which we tend to contribute behavioral factors to the actions of others, while contributing situational factors to our own actions. This difference is that with the FAE there is a certain amount of estimation involved, whereas the A/O Bias suggests people don't even consider the situational factors.
The Self-Serving bias presumes that we contribute our successes to behavioral components, while contributing situational factors to our failures, and the opposite for other people.

But these factors each play a role in the how we react to media persuasion, and I just felt compelled to leave a comment because I think it is an interesting perspective.

Hi Interested (I hope we're on first name terms): Thanks for that elaboration... it's fascinating to note there's a lot of unconscious biases affecting our judgent.