Name three common decision-making pitfalls in collaborative settings.

• A. Halo effect, recency bias, and group polarization.
• B. Groupthink, confirmation bias, and sunk-cost trap.
• C. Anchoring, availability heuristic, and optimism bias.
• D. None of these.

Answer: (B)

In collaborative decision-making, three common pitfalls tend to derail good outcomes: groupthink, confirmation bias, and the sunk-cost trap. Groupthink happens when the desire for harmony or conformity overrides critical evaluation, so team members don’t voice dissenting opinions or challenge flawed assumptions. Confirmation bias is the tendency to favor information that supports the team’s preconceptions, leading to selective gathering and interpretation of evidence and a biased conclusion. The sunk-cost trap occurs when teams continue investing in a failing course of action because of the investments already made, rather than evaluating current data and future value objectively.

These together capture how group dynamics and cognitive biases can steer a group toward poor choices: the urge for agreement, the filtering of evidence, and the reluctance to abandon prior commitments. The other options mix in biases or phenomena that are real but don’t collectively represent the strongest trio of collaborative decision-making pitfalls.