L6: Cognitive school Flashcards
What is cognition?
The conscious intellectual processes which helps us to form decisions.
in strategy the cognitive school is much broader than management; focus on cognition in decision-making
The mind of the strategist
What are characteristics of the cognitive school?
- strategy formation is a cognitive process that takes place in the head of the strategist
- strategies emerge as perspectives - shaping how to deal with inputs from the environment (concepts, maps, schemas etc.)
- These inputs are;
- Distorted by filters before being decoded
- Interpretations of an environment that only exists in perception
- as concepts, strategies are difficult to attain, less than optimal and difficult to change
What are the two wings of the cognitive school?
- Objective wing -> cognition is re-creation of the world, being distorted by filters
- Subjective wing -> Cognition creates the world - strategy is an interpretation of the world
What are the different biases?
- Conformation bias - search for supportive evidence
- Inconsistency bias - incinsistent behaviour; switch between preferences
- conservatism/status quo bias - preference for the current situation
- Recency - base decisions on the most recent piece of information
- Availability - Media presents certain aspects, but nog everything and therefore you can miss important info
- Anchoring -> rely too much on pre-existing information or first information they find
- Illusory correlations -> Believe in something; lucky charms
- Selective perception -> fail to see other one’s perspective leads to conflicts
- Regression effects -> observe a certain causal relationship between a and B but C affects this and this is not seen
- Attribution success/failure -> take credits when success, blame others when fail
- Optimism -> thinking it is easier to achieve something than it actually is
- Underestimating uncertainty -> we only see 1 outcome, not all other possible outcomes
What are the different distortions of the objective wing?
- Methaphors/analogy
can open up thinking and inspire, but also oversimplify and narrow views - Illusion of control
Decision makers may think they have more control over outcomes than they actually have (overestimate their ability to control events) - Escalating commitment
Continued investment to a course of actopm even though outcome is declining - single outcome calculation
Denying alternative options/solutions
How to prevent biases to occur?
- Neutralizing the effects of the biases
- Be aware of them
- Constantly reflect on choices made
- Add decision-making teams to the organization
how can Cognition be used for informastion processing?
- Attention - Pay attention wjile proicessing info to affect desicion making positively
- Encoding - Categorizing and giving meaning to information
- Storage/retrieval - saving information to memory and knowing when to retrieve it
- Decision - eventual choices
- Outcomes - Consequences of process that feedback information from learning
How can cognition be used?
- As information processing
- as mapping (mental structures to organize knowledge)
- as concept attainment (strategy making is seen as concept attainment.
- as construction (subjective cognition; cognition is the construction
What are psychological frames and what are the properties?
Psychological frames helps to understand the environment and the situation; what is inside and what is outside.
- frames are exclusive
- Frames are inclusive
- Frames are related to premises (informative of how to interpret the frame)
- Frames are meta-communicative (any message which defines a frame gives the receiver instructions to understand messages
What is the framing effect?
Representing something in a certain way to make sure individuals make certain choices
What is message framing?
If you donate money this cute bunny will live happily ever after positive frame
Vs
If you don’t donate money this cute bunny will die negative frame
What are 3 competing conceptions of the environment?
- The objective environment = external and independent
- Perceived environment = how individuals perceive the environment
- Enacted environment = recreation of perceived environment
What is criticism on the cognitive school?
- no attention for how concepts and decisions are formed in the head of strategists
- individual vs collective there is no collective brain
- focus on restrictions - does not look at positive effects of biases
- does it matter that reality is a social coinstruction and information can be perceived differently
What are contributions of cognitive school?
First school opening black box
different perspective on environment
different direction of tresearch attention
Who is central actor?
Strategists
