Today’s episode was recorded at ISF’s 2023 Congress in Rotterdam. Steve sat down with Tali Sharot, professor of neuroscience at University College London, to talk about her fascinating research on optimism bias. Tali offers fresh, evidence-based ideas on effective communication for security leaders seeking to present their message to their board and raise cyber awareness within the organisation.

1. Innately, the brain is an optimist.

2. Implications for the business community.

3. Present bias means that people care more about now than the future.

4. Data is key, and pairing anecdotes with data can be more effective.

1. Sharot’s research about how emotion affects memory (0:28)

2. Optimism bias has implications for the way we evaluate risk (4:25)

3. Sharot considers present bias and how it shows up in organisations (9:39)

4. Why storytelling is so effective when paired with data (15:30)

1. “It turns out that in behavioral economics, there was quite a lot of research about this thing called the optimism bias, which is our tendency to imagine the future as better than the past, than the present. And that's exactly what I was seeing in this experiment. And that was really the first experiment that I did looking at what goes on inside the brain that causes us to have these kind of rose-colored glasses on when we think about the future.” -Tali Sharot

2. “What we find again and again is that people underestimate the risk. And that's, of course, a problem. And it's not just underestimating risk. People also underestimate how long projects will take to complete, how much it would cost, underestimating budgets. All these are related to this phenomena of the optimism bias. And so it's really difficult to try to convince people that their estimate is incorrect. Because what we found is that if you give people information to try to correct their estimate, and you tell them actually, it's much worse than what you thought, your risk is much higher than what you're thinking, people don't take that information and change their belief to the extent that they should. They do learn a little bit, but not enough … However, if you tell them actually, you don't have as much risk as you think, you're in a great position, then they learn really quickly.” -Tali Sharot

3. “The immediacy is quite important, because we have what's called a present bias. We care more about the now than the future. In general, even if we're not aware of that.” -Tali Sharot

4. “And what stories do, they do a few things. First of all, we're more likely to attend to stories, right to listen, they're more interesting, they're more colorful, they're more detailed, we're more likely to remember them, partially because they usually elicit more emotion than just the data. So it's good to pair the two, to have the anecdote that kind of illustrates the data that you already have in hand.” -Tali Sharot

Mentioned in this episode:

books by Tali Sharot 

Read the transcript of this episode

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