Winner of CM Division Best Paper Award - Conflict in Context
A vast literature has documented systematic decision-making biases in both field and laboratory settings, often with profound implications for conflict management in organizational contexts. However, it remains controversial whether experience is likely to extinguish decision-making biases in natural field settings such as real-world organizations. Prior findings seem contradictory. Some prior studies suggest that experience will reliably extinguish biases, but other prior studies suggest the opposite – that biases can persist even among highly experienced individuals. We resolve this apparent contradiction by using a large-scale five-year natural field experiment at a major nonprofit organization to test whether and how quickly experience extinguishes biases in volunteer workers’ labor supply decisions. We show that although workers’ decision-making biases can eventually be extinguished by experience, this learning process is extremely slow. Each hour of experience shrinks workers’ biases by just ~0.07%. As a result, it takes over 1,200 hours of experience to completely extinguish workers’ biases – but unfortunately, less than 1% of workers ever attain that much experience. Therefore, while experience can gradually shrink and eventually extinguish workers’ decision-making biases, this learning process happens so slowly that over 99% of workers never acquire the immense amount of experience that would be necessary to extinguish their biases.