Executives Know the Biases. So Why Do They Keep Repeating the Same Mistakes?

New study of 120 global executives finds the problem isn't a lack of self-awareness — it's the organizations they work in.

Most senior executives can immediately rattle off the classic cognitive biases like overconfidence, confirmation bias, status quo bias. Yet a new study out of Georgia State University's Robinson College of Business finds that knowing the common biases that lead to mistakes does little to stop leaders from making, and repeating, those same costly mistakes.

The research, published in the Rutgers Business Review, and led by Cuneyt Evirgen and Tamer Cavusgil of Georgia State’s Robinson College of Business, along with Sebastian van der Vegt of WMBV Consulting and Ying Zhu of Adelaide University.

“As both academic and industry experts, we anecdotally observed that the same mistakes and failures happening in the global marketplace, so we wanted to know if there are foundational drivers that lead to repeat mistakes without leaders realizing it,” said Cuneyt Evirgen, lead author and international business professor at Robinson.

The team spent months interviewing business leaders, ran a Delphi consultation to sharpen their findings, and then surveyed more than 120 senior executives worldwide to test whether the patterns held up.
They did. A striking 94% of the executives surveyed said the study's findings matched their own experience.

“When executives describe why bad decisions keep happening, they point less to textbook heuristics than to something more uncomfortable,” the authors write — pressures baked into how companies are run, not just how individual minds work.

The study identifies five overlapping root causes behind repeated executive missteps:

1. Short-term bias (46% named this the top cause). Quarterly earnings pressure and shrinking CEO tenures push leaders toward safe, short-horizon decisions and away from long-term bets. The authors point to Peloton, which poured over $400 million into a new U.S. factory at the height of its pandemic boom, only to watch its market value collapse from $55 billion to roughly $3 billion as demand normalized.

2. Business-as-usual thinking (10%). Leaders lean on what worked before, even when the market has changed. Home Depot's failed China expansion, which was built on its U.S. big-box playbook, ignored smaller living spaces, local labor norms, and cheaper local competitors.

3. Pressure to be right (12%). Executives are often rewarded for projecting certainty, making it hard to reverse course once a position is public. The authors use as an example, Boeing's slow, defensive response in the early days of the 737 Max crisis.

4. Stakeholder misalignment (9%). Legal compliance isn't the same as genuine engagement. Mining company Rio Tinto had legal clearance — and its own report flagging the site's significance — when it destroyed a 46,000-year-old sacred Aboriginal site in 2020, triggering a global backlash and the resignation of its CEO.

5. Weak organizational culture (23%, the single largest share). Cultures that punish dissent or lack channels for upward feedback let small errors calcify into systemic ones. Uber's early reckoning with workplace culture, following a 2017 whistleblower account, forced a leadership overhaul before real change took hold.

“None of these biases act in isolation,” said Evirgen, “There’s a lot of interaction with the biases because there are human-centered factors versus organizational factors and the dynamics between these two factors result in particular decisions. For example, if you’re the CEO there’s pressure to be right, but you operate within an organizational structure that has multiple and differing expectations to manage so executives need to operate in an organizational culture that encourages challenging assumptions and in-depth reviews of operational issues.”

The study’s central learning for business leaders: recognizing your own bias isn't enough. Organizations have to be deliberately designed to counteract it.

Survey respondents pointed to concrete tactics that helped, including crisis simulations that force teams to practice high-stakes decisions before a real emergency hits, cross-functional teams that surface assumptions a single department might miss, and mentorship programs that pass hard-won lessons from senior leaders to the next generation — what one executive called the “inheritance of painful experiences” that many younger leaders never receive.

Building a culture where employees feel safe challenging a decision emerged as the throughline connecting all five causes. As the authors put it, culture determines “whether cognitive biases remain individual tendencies or become systemic organizational failures.”

The findings carry weight well beyond the boardroom. The failures examined in the study, from Boeing's 737 Max crisis to Rio Tinto's destruction of a sacred site, came with real costs to employees, communities, and shareholders alike. For investors and regulators, the research offers a reminder that these outcomes are rarely the product of a single “bad apple” leader; they're often the predictable result of incentive structures that reward short-term certainty over long-term judgment.

For rising leaders and MBA students, the takeaway is equally direct: self-awareness is a starting point, not a solution. Avoiding tomorrow's headline-making mistake means building the organizational guardrails — debate, dissent, mentorship, and structured challenge — that individual willpower alone can't provide.