Eight Biases That Make You Argue Against the Advice You Asked For
You asked what to do. You got an answer. Now listen to what comes out of your mouth next.
A school owner setup a time with me because he wanted to fix his retention. He was losing ten percent of his students and he wanted it stopped. (BTW: That’s a TON!)
I went through his classes. His renewal / upgrade rates. Every process he had, start to finish.
The problem wasn’t hidden. He was renewing only thirty percent of his beginners. Seven out of every ten people who walked through his door did not set a goal to get their Black Belt and Beyond, and everything downstream of that number was a symptom of it.
I told him what to do. Ask them before their first belt test.
“Well, I don’t want to ask before they’ve been in class a while.”
Then, “Oh yes, but the parents need to see them make progress.”
Then, “Yes, but I want to make sure they know the curriculum.”
And on. And on. The conversation ran about ten minutes and felt like an hour, because I could hear the next objection loading while he was still delivering the last one.
I have heard them all… The change would fix the exact problem he wanted help with. It would make him more money. It would produce more black belts. It was EASIER than what he was already doing, not harder. And he was paying me, to find things like this and tell him about them.
He argued anyway.
I’ve watched this happen hundreds of times, and I’ve done it myself more than I’d like to count. It’s not stubbornness and it isn’t ego, though both of those show up to help. It’s eight specific mental shortcuts, all of them useful, all of them firing in the wrong room. The reason why matters, because you’re almost certainly doing this somewhere right now.
Before you read the list, pick the thing you’re currently defending. What I or one of your mentors have repeatedly told you to do but it hasn’t happened yet. You already know what it is. Hold it in your head while you read, because the value of this is diagnostic, not academic.
Why do smart owners defend what isn’t working?
A heuristic is a trade. You give up accuracy and you get speed.
That trade is a bargain almost everywhere. You don’t run a cost-benefit analysis on whether to brake the car. You don’t write a pro con list when you order from a menu. You don’t audit a stranger’s intentions from scratch. Your brain uses a rule that was right the last thousand times (or sometimes was a learned shortcut that we learned at 5-10 years old) and moves on, and it’s often correct to do that, because the cost of thinking takes up a lot of energy and most decisions don’t justify it.
Then you sit down with someone who’s looking at your business from the outside, and the same machinery runs, and it produces a paragraph of justifications that sounds like analysis.
It isn’t analysis. It’s a rule that fired, followed by a justification your brain wrote afterward so the decision would feel deliberate.
Every one of the eight below is worth understanding on its own terms, including the part where it’s right. You can’t disarm a shortcut you think is stupid. You disarm it by knowing exactly what it’s good for and exactly where it stops being good for anything.
Each one gets the same treatment. What it is, a situation where running it is the right call, where it breaks, and what it looks like in your school and in the rest of your life.
1. The Endowment Effect. Why does owning something raise what you think it’s worth?
Why the heuristic (shortcut) might work. You’re selling the van you used for student pickup. You know it was serviced every five thousand miles, you know the transmission was rebuilt two years ago, and you know it has never once failed to start in winter. A buyer walks up and sees mileage. Holding out above his opening offer is the correct move, because you’re pricing in information he doesn’t have and can’t get from the odometer. Refusing the first number is not sentiment. It’s you being the better-informed party.
Where it breaks. The mug had no history. Five minutes of ownership, no accumulated knowledge whatsoever, and the premium appeared anyway. It attached to possession itself, not to anything you learned by possessing it. Economists have spent twenty years arguing over whether the gap is really loss aversion or partly a side effect of how the experiments are run (Plott & Zeiler, 2005). Treat the gap as real and the explanation as unsettled.
In your school. It’s the program you’d defend before anyone criticized it. Somebody suggests cutting it and you produce four reasons that are all true and none of them responsive, because the question was never what the program is worth to you. That’s the version your brain answered. The question on the table was whether it earns its slot on the schedule.
In regular life. Every house on the market is worth more to the person who lived in it than to anyone touring it. The seller is pricing the tree he planted and the room he painted. The buyer is pricing square footage, and the house sits.
2. The IKEA Effect. Why is the thing you built yourself the hardest one to change?
Why the heuristic (shortcut) might work. You spent ten years building a beginner curriculum around what actually holds a seven-year-old’s attention. A consultant watches two classes and tells you to swap the order. Weighting your version above his is correct here, and you should. You have a decade of testing days behind your sequence and he has ninety minutes of observation. The person who built the thing usually does know more about it than the person reviewing it, and refusing to hand it over on first contact protects real knowledge.
Where it breaks. The origami study is where you can see the seam. Builders folded frogs and cranes badly, then priced them near what expert-folded versions commanded. Everyone else looked at the same objects and saw creased paper worth almost nothing. Effort inflated the value without touching the quality.
In your school. Owners get fixated on a way too complicated curriculum structure, and the age split is the one I see most. Three and four year olds in one class. Five and six in another. Seven and eight in another, and on up the line.
It sounds logical. Developmentally targeted, tightly grouped, obviously more professional than putting them together.
It’s also a schedule you can’t staff, can’t fill, and can’t cover when an instructor calls in sick, and a family with two kids now has to make two trips. None of that complexity was necessary in the first place. Kids learn fine in a wider band, which is why the schools running the simple version are the ones with full mats.
The owners who build these defend them the hardest, and the research says why. The structure took real work, and the work is what makes it valuable to the person who did it. Complexity feels like sophistication when you’re the one who assembled it.
Same thing happens with the belt requirements you tuned over a decade. Propose changing one and it doesn’t arrive as a scheduling conversation. It arrives as a performance review of your work, and you defend it the way anyone defends their work.
In regular life. You drafted your own fantasy football team. Somebody offers you a straight upgrade for the guy you took in the fourth round, and you turn it down. You did the research on him. Everyone else in the league can see the trade is good for you, and you’re the only person at the table who can’t.
3. Status Quo Bias. Why does “we’ve always run it this way” feel like a reason?
Why the heuristic (shortcut) might work. A staff member three weeks into the job wants to reorganize your belt testing procedure. He’s got a clean idea and a good reason for it. Defaulting to the existing procedure is the right call, because yours has survived forty testing days, three power outages and a family that showed up an hour late with a video camera. Its flaws are flaws you’ve already priced and already routed around. His version has flaws nobody has met yet, and unknown flaws are the ones that hurt on a testing day.
Where it breaks. The rule stops working the moment the current arrangement stops producing. Then “we’ve always run it this way” is a description of the problem wearing the costume of a defense.
In your school. The class schedule that got set when you had a third of your current enrollment. It made sense then. Nobody revisited it, because nothing forced a revisit, and inertia never announces itself as a choice. This one was in the room during my retention conversation, dressed up as “I don’t want to ask before they’ve been in class a while.”
In regular life. Your phone plan. Your insurance. You’ve been on the same one for years, you’re reasonably sure you’re overpaying, and switching would cost you one afternoon. That afternoon has now gone unspent for six years running.
4. The Sunk Cost Fallacy. Why can’t you kill the program you’ve already paid for?
Why the heuristic (shortcut) might work. You’re eight months into building an after-school program. You bought the van, you trained the driver, you got the contracts signed with two elementary schools. Enrollment is climbing slower than you projected but it is climbing. Killing it in month eight because the numbers aren’t there yet would throw away a program that’s on schedule to work. Counting what you’ve already put in is what keeps you in the seat long enough to find out, and most things worth building have a stretch that looks exactly like failure from the inside.
Where it breaks. It breaks on a point that’s simple to state and almost impossible to feel. Past spending can’t be recovered by future spending. The three years are gone either way, and the only live question is what the next dollar buys.
In your school. The program that never filled. Three years of schedule real estate, staff hours, and a line in every brochure. Suggest cutting it and the defense arrives fully formed, and every sentence in it is about the past.
In regular life. You’re an hour into a bad movie you paid for. You already know how you feel about it, and you stay to the end anyway, buying nothing with those ninety minutes except the feeling that the ticket wasn’t wasted.
5. Escalation of Commitment. Why does bad news make you spend more instead of less?
Why the heuristic (shortcut) might work. Your ad campaign has an ugly first two weeks. You built it, so you know things the report doesn’t show. The creative was in review for four days. The audience was still learning. Your best-performing version only went live at the end of week two. Funding it through the learning phase is the correct call, and an outsider reading nothing but the week-two cost per lead would kill something that was days away from working. The person who owns the decision usually is holding information the observer can’t see.
Where it breaks. The reason for continuing migrates from the evidence over to your authorship, and it makes that move without announcing it. Nothing about the campaign improved. What changed is that backing off now costs you something the numbers were never measuring. Sunk cost is about money that was spent. This one is about who spent it, and it’s the more expensive of the two, because it keeps writing new checks.
In your school. The ad campaign that isn’t converting, getting more budget. The test is short. If an owner inherited this school today, with no history and no authorship, would they keep funding this?
In regular life. The renovation you’re four months and two change orders into with the contractor you picked. Firing him means admitting you picked him, so instead you approve another invoice and tell yourself the end is close.
6. Loss Aversion. Why do twelve students you might lose outweigh forty you might gain?
Why the heuristic (shortcut) might work. Your 5 PM class is full and it’s the class your best families build their week around. Somebody pitches you a restructure that moves it. Guarding that hour harder than you chase a hypothetical new hour is correct, because the students in that room are paying your rent right now and the ones in the pitch are a projection. Businesses die from losing the base, not from failing to add. Protecting what’s already yours before reaching for what isn’t is how you get to stay open long enough to grow.
Where it breaks. In a business with room to grow, the downside is bounded and the upside isn’t. Twelve students leaving is survivable and you’d survive it. Forty students never arriving is invisible, and invisible losses never trigger the alarm.
In your school. Imagine a schedule change. Every owner can identify the specific families who might have an issue. Not one can name the families they’d have serviced better, the increase in income they’d have (because they can run more efficiently) and how it’d help the instruction process.
In regular life. The better job offer you turned down. You could list everything you’d be giving up at the current one in about four seconds, and you couldn’t describe the upside at all, because you’d never lived it.
7. Ambiguity Aversion. Why does a known bad number beat an unknown good one?
Why the heuristic (shortcut) might work. A vendor pitches you a new billing platform. No references you can call, no schools your size on it, no numbers on what happens when a card declines. Your current system is clunky and you know exactly what it costs and exactly how it fails, because you’ve watched it fail. Staying put is the right answer, and it isn’t timidity. An unknown distribution can hide the month your tuition doesn’t draft, and no efficiency gain is worth finding that out in real time.
Where it breaks. It breaks when the known quantity is a slow bleed and the unknown is merely unmeasured. Those aren’t the same thing. A number nobody has run yet isn’t dangerous, it’s just absent, and treating absence as danger hands the decision to whichever option happens to have a spreadsheet behind it.
In your school. It’s the whole reason owners stay on tuition they set years ago. “I know exactly what my current rate produces.” Yes. It produces this. They want to make more but don’t have the experience that they would have great results at a higher rate.
In regular life. You pick the restaurant you already know is mediocre over the new place that might be excellent, because mediocre is a number and might-be-excellent isn’t.
8. Psychological Reactance. Why does being told what to do make you want to do the opposite?
Why the heuristic (shortcut) might work. A credit card company wants you to switch to their “better rates, better service” system, and the pushback comes out of you before you’ve finished the sentence. You should push back. Your experience is that most of these vary little and it’s probably not worth your time. That reflex is a large part of how you stayed in business through every vendor and expert who arrived with instructions. Nobody advising you carries any of the consequences, and a brain that resists external control is protecting the one person who does.
Where it breaks. Reactance never evaluates the advice. It fires on the delivery, not the content. Which is why a suggestion you rejected flatly in one conversation resurfaces months later as your own idea and gets implemented inside a week. You might not find the great credit card deal that would actually save you thousands. There’s a detail that makes it worse in the situation this article is about. You asked (you didn’t ask the cold calling merchant service guy). The freedom you’re defending was never under threat, because you’re the one who opened the door and invited the person in.
A corollary of this is when your staff will listen to someone else suggest something you have told them hundreds of times. They have more reactance to you than someone new (the “you can’t be a prophet in your own land” syndrome).
In your school. Any correction delivered in front of your staff, no matter how right, will cost you more compliance than the same correction delivered alone. You already know this, because you use it on students.
In regular life. Tell a teenager to clean their room and watch the room get less clean. The room was going to get cleaned. The instruction is what stopped it.
How do these eight actually show up in a real conversation?
Go back to the retention conversation and count what was actually in the room.
“I don’t want to ask before they’ve been in class a while” is status quo bias. That’s the sequence he’d always used, and nothing had forced him to revisit it.
“The parents need to see them make progress” is loss aversion. He could picture the family that would walk if he asked too early. He couldn’t picture the seventy percent who were already walking.
“I want to make sure they know the curriculum” is the IKEA effect. His curriculum. His standard for what knowing it means.
Underneath all three, reactance was doing the real work, because none of those objections were produced by weighing the idea. They were produced by the idea arriving from outside him.
And the whole run was protected by escalation of commitment, because he’d built the enrollment sequence himself and changing it now meant conceding that the version he’d defended for years was the thing costing him students.
Five biases. One ten-minute conversation (felt like an hour to me). Not one of them announced itself, and every single objection he raised was a sentence a reasonable person could say out loud without embarrassment.
That’s what makes this hard. You will never catch yourself producing an obviously stupid reason. You’ll catch yourself producing your third good one.
How do you catch your own bias in real time?
Start by lowering your expectations of self-awareness. You will not catch these by being smart about them in the moment, because in the moment you’re running the computer program the way it was designed.
What works is building the check before you need it.
Decide in advance what would change your mind. Before the conversation, write down the answer to one question. What would I have to see to do this differently? Put a real thing on the paper. A renewal percentage. A number of trials. A date. Write it before anybody tells you anything, because the second they do, your brain gets busy building the defense and it will not stop to negotiate terms. Then when the advice comes, you’re not deciding whether you like it. You’re checking it against something you already wrote. If you sit down to write and nothing comes out, you don’t have a position. You have an attachment, and an attachment has no number that could ever move it.
Run the reversal test. You’re defending the current schedule. If you didn’t already have it, and someone walked in and proposed it today, would you adopt it? A no means you aren’t choosing it. You’re keeping it. This is the cleanest available tool against status quo bias and it takes about four seconds.
Ask someone who has already done it. Not another owner at your level. He’ll agree with you, because he’s running the same shortcuts you are and your reasons will sound completely reasonable to him. He’ll buy your reasoning, and you’ll walk away feeling validated and unchanged. Ask a mentor who has already built the thing you’re trying to build, more than once, in more than one location. Someone who has personally moved the number you’re arguing about and has no reason to spare your feelings about it. That’s the difference between collecting agreement and getting an answer.
Put an end date on the trial. Ambiguity aversion and loss aversion both feed on open-ended exposure, because an unbounded unknown is exactly the thing they’re built to refuse. A sixty-day test with one defined measure and a scheduled review isn’t unbounded. Nobody’s asking you to abandon the program. They’re asking you to run an experiment with a stop date on it, which is a materially smaller request than the one your nervous system heard.
Separate the decision from the author. This is the hardest one and it carries the most weight. The IKEA effect, escalation of commitment and reactance all are similar, which is that the thing under discussion is you. It isn’t. You built it with the information you had, and it was probably a good decision with that information. New information doesn’t retroactively make the old call stupid. It makes it old, and old is not an insult.
Owners who change quickly aren’t less attached to their work than you are. They’ve just stopped filing “this needs to change” under “I was wrong.”
What to do this week
Most owners will read a list like this, agree with all of it, and apply it to somebody else. That’s the outcome I’d bet on, and it’s the same shortcut running one level up.
The next time you ask someone what to do and then hear yourself explaining why the current version is fine, stop mid-sentence. Not to agree with them. Agreeing on the spot is its own error and it’s usually just a different kind of compliance.
Stop long enough to figure out which of the eight is doing the talking. Then answer the question that was actually asked.
Thirty percent beginner renewal is not a mystery that needs solving. It’s a number somebody already told the owner how to fix.
You paid for the advice, in money or in the favor of somebody’s time. Argue with it after you’ve understood it, not before.
If you want an outside read on the thing you’re defending right now, that’s a conversation worth having.
Chief Master Greg Moody, Ph.D.
References
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