By now the message from decades of decision-making research and recent popular books such as Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow should be clear: The irrational manner in which the human brain often works influences people’s decisions in ways that they and others around them fail to anticipate. The resulting errors prevent us from making sound business and personal decisions, even when we’ve accumulated abundant work experience and knowledge.

Unfortunately, even though we know a lot about how biases like overconfidence, confirmation bais, and loss aversion affect our decisions, people still struggle to counter them in a systematic fashion so they don’t cause us to make ineffective, or poor, decisions. As a result, even when executives think they are taking appropriate steps to correct or overcome employee bias, their actions often don’t work.

What’s the solution? Behavioral economics — the study of how people make decisions, drawing on insights from the fields of psychology, judgment and decision making, and economics — can provide an answer. Since it is so difficult to rewire the human brain in order to fundamentally undo the patterns that lead to biases, behavioral economics advocates that we accept human decision-making errors as given and instead focus on altering the decision-making context in ways that lead to better outcomes. Managers can use this knowledge to improve the effectiveness of a process or system inside their organizations.

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