Discriminability Effect
Discriminability effect or hard-easy effect occurs when we incorrectly predict our ability to complete a task based on the level of difficulty. The effect states that we tend to be more confident in our ability to complete hard tasks and less confident when it comes to easy ones.
The discriminability effect makes us ineffective both at the workplace and life in general.
Let’s say you’ve got a big promotion interview coming up and you need to prepare for it. So you have 2 tasks ahead of you:
Research the things that the interviewers might ask from you and prepare for it.
Collate all the readily available data needed for making an argument for your promotion.
In this case, it is fairly obvious that task 1 is the hardest since you have a lot of variables and task 2 is easy because you probably already have the data and peripherals to make the argument.
But according to the discriminability effect, you are more likely to assume that you’ll ace the interview by winging it for the most part. And not just that, you are likely to assume that preparing the reports is going to be harder since there is assimilation and presentation involved.
On the day of the interview, you might have over prepared for the presentation (task 2) and clear that criteria but you might fail the actual interview (task 1) because you didn’t prepare well for it.
The hard-easy effect can have a significant impact on your personal life too. Think of all the times you were assigned a task or had a responsibility and you assumed that it would be easy to accomplish so you didn’t prepare as well.
This effect can also shape your behaviour. Let’s take the idea of forming political opinions, you are more likely to assume that you will learn about a political issue/topic easily than figuring out how to argue well in general.
You might lose your sleep over whether you’ll be tongue tied in an argument while completely discarding the fact that you are not very well versed with the facts of that issue. Learning about an issue is much more difficult and critical to making a good argument than your soft skills. Yet, most of us would believe that soft skills is what is making us lose the argument even when we do not know the issue deeply.
Similar issues plague corporations and startups. A lot of them will spend so much time worrying about branding etc that they fail to do their legal due diligence which is a difficult task. So a lot of them end up with needless litigation battles while getting the right font on their logo.
In other example; more or less, every war that was ever fought was likely because of one side’s overconfidence in doing the hard task. There is no such thing as perfectly matched armies, one side is always at a disadvantage yet the losing side believes that its side is on par if not better than the opposing army.
The discriminability effect happens as a result of a combination of other biases like the confirmation bias, the Dunning Kruger effect, bike-shedding etc.
The way to avoid the discriminability effect is by acquiring sufficient knowledge about a topic or task before assigning priority. Research has shown that people with high fluency or competency in a topic are more likely to prioritise their tasks in the right order.
The more you know, the less you have to guess and the less you have to guess, the easier it is to make objective decisions.
For example; if you are in the interview scenario discussed earlier, your best bet is to understand from others who have attended a similar interview process about what it is really like and what got them selected or rejected. Next, you can talk to people who have evaluated you before, to tell you where you are falling short.
Combine these 2 inputs and then create a strategy instead of automatically assuming that since you are good at impromptu conversations, you will be able to do the interview well. That is not how things work.
So that is it! What are your thoughts on this effect?
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