Key Points from my Conversation with Jan-Ole Hesselberg

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Key Points

• Name What You Cut Away
  A decision always cuts something else away, so name the opportunity cost before you choose. After a hard-to-reverse choice, stop steering through the rearview mirror and put your attention on the road you actually picked.
  
  
• Spend the Time You Have Purposefully
  Gut feeling will show up anyway. It’s a bad strategy for the 20 min you do have available. For hiring, money, and other repeats, decide in advance how you will spend that time instead of calling time pressure an excuse to skip a proper process.
  
  
• Assume Your Decisions Are Biased
  Fast mental shortcuts keep you safe in potentially dangerous situations, but they also affect your judgment toward e.g. authority bias or anchoring. For important decisions, assume you are being biased and build a process that dilutes this as much as possible.
  
  
• Views Not Shared Compound
  Tiny meeting silences stack: “they’ve already thought of it,” “I don’t want to look argumentative.” If several people swallow four comments each, the group quietly converges on conformity and weaker information.
  
  
• Judgments First, Status Last
  Collect independent views before anyone sits down together. In the room, share strengths and weaknesses, not scores or “we should hire her,” and let the person with the most status speak last.
  
  
• Vote Instead of Reading the Room
  End with an advisory vote, instead of reading the room. Otherwise you can lock in a plan most people privately dislike, then watch morale leak later when they finally say so.
  
  
• Feeling Rigorous is not Consistency
  Feeling rigorous is not the same as being consistent. When you can, run the same case past two people or two panels and treat large disagreement as a process problem to be solved, not proof that one side “got it.”
  
  
• Write the Bet Before the Result
  Write the bet down before the outcome arrives: what would count as success, by when, on which metric. If you skip that, hindsight and confirmation bias will rewrite the story until you look wiser than you were.
  
  
• Don’t Trust Your Certainty
  Confidence is a weak signal that you are right. People who say they are 90% sure are often right far less often. Stay open to a second look even when the answer feels obvious.
  
  
• You’re Already Designing the Choice
  You cannot avoid shaping other people’s choices. The salads or the burgers will sit at eye level either way. Work on the choice architecture on purpose, and remember that what the people around someone actually do predicts their behavior better than the values they recite.

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Episode Details

Intro

“How we make decisions and that we are very often not aware of what influences us.“
“If you pick at random psychology study from those years, it’s more likely that they are not true than they are true.“
“If you know what the most senior judge thinks in a case, you know the outcome of that case with 96% certainty.“

Joachim’s Intro of the Guest

Today’s guest is Jan-Ole Hesselberg.

I’m fascinated by how we think and the forces that influence our judgments and choices. I’ve been intrigued by books like “Nudge“, “Predictably Irrational“, “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion“, “Thinking, Fast and Slow,” cognitive biases, and so on.

At this stage, Jan-Ole is one of Norway’s most respected voices on psychology, decision-making, and research ethics.

He’s a trained psychologist, currently pursuing a PhD in decision theory, and serves as Chief Program Officer at the Dam Foundation and Program Manager at the Kavli Trust.

He’s a popular public speaker, writer, podcaster, and occasional TV co-host, best known to many from Folkeopplysningen (with Andreas Wahl), and Typisk deg (with Petter Schjerven). In these shows, he makes science and psychology understandable and useful for everyday life.

He’s been an advisor to the Rema 1000 management (the 2^nd largest grocery store chain in Norway), and recently gave a talk to the largest sovereign wealth fund in the world (Norway’s Government Pension Fund Global) on decision-making.

He’s also the author of the acclaimed book “Bedre Beslutninger”, which translates cutting-edge decision theory into practical tools we can all use to think and make better choices.

…and now dear friends, my conversation with Jan-Ole Hesselberg.

⏱️ Timestamps

00:00 – Intro
00:35 – Guest Intro
06:24 – Two modes of thinking behind every decision
17:13 – How much published psychology research actually holds up?
25:51 – The lowest-hanging fruit for better group decisions
37:27 – How teams end up choosing what nobody wants
49:03 – What 10,000 Supreme Court votes quietly reveal
55:06 – How random are expert funding decisions, really?
1:08:48 – The surprising power of a famous name
1:15:16 – Does anonymizing CVs really make hiring fairer?
1:24:05 – Two biases that keep false beliefs alive
1:37:13 – Nudging, choice architecture, and the organ donor puzzle
1:41:57 – Practical advice to make better decisions this year