Action Bias describes the tendency to favour taking action over doing nothing, even when the available evidence does not indicate it is likely to result in a better outcome.
Taking action in response to a problem feels productive and can help you feel like you are restoring a sense of control compared to just allowing events to unfold around you.
It can also be easier to defend afterwards – if the outcome is bad at least you can say you tried to do something about it rather than simply doing nothing. This creates an imbalance where taking action is judged by what you hoped it would achieve compared to judging not taking action which by what might go wrong.
External pressure can strengthen the effect of action bias. During a crisis, customers or senior stakeholders may expect to see a decisive response, and restraint – even when it is the better option – can seem like indecision.
None of this means that taking action is always the wrong option. It just means that the urge to act may be influencing your judgement about whether to doing something rather than exercising restraint is actually the best course of action.
Action Bias Among Elite Soccer Goalkeepers
Analysis of 286 penalty kicks from top leagues and championships worldwide found that, based on the distribution of where penalties were placed, goalkeepers had the greatest chance of making a save by remaining in the centre of the goal.
Despite this, goalkeepers almost always dived either left or right. The researchers argued that this was likely because diving was viewed the expected response, and this meant conceding a goal after staying still felt worse than conceding after diving, because the goalkeeper may feel they failed to make an attempt to save it.
A second study involving 32 top professional goalkeepers supported the idea that diving was considered the normal response to a penalty over staying in the centre. The researchers noted that this tendency was particularly striking because goalkeepers have strong incentives to make the best possible decision and face penalty situations regularly throughout their careers.
Intelligence Considerations
Action bias can push you into recommending a response and fail to sufficiently consider the benefits of waiting out in your assessments. It can also impact collection as well, with agents being tasked to provide further intelligence even when additional information is unlikely to change a decision.
The effect is particularly acute during crises and other time-sensitive events. The pressure to provide something useful can encourage you to recommend what to do in response to a situation before you fully understand it.
Scenario: You are working in a military intelligence cell and identify increased military activity near a disputed border, but as yet are unable to determine whether it is preparation for an operation or just an exercise or routine rotation.
Senior stakeholders are pressuring you for an immediate response, so you recommend mobilising additional forces near the border as a precaution. The other side interprets this as preparation for military action and responds in kind by moving more of its own forces towards the border.
By failing to consider the benefits of exercising restraint, a recommendation you made that aimed to reduce risk actually ended up escalating the situation and increasing the threat of conflict.
CIA Covert Action in the Early Cold War
The creation of the United States’ Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) coincided with growing concern over Soviet influence and expansion following World War Two.
The Agency’s activity went beyond collecting and analysing intelligence as it became increasingly involved in efforts to influence events overseas and operational work became a key aspect of its remit.
Thomas L. Ahern Jr.
Former CIA operations officer Thomas L. Ahern Jr. wrote in his memoir, “Nothing if not Eventful”, that an “action bias” had dominated the Agency’s agenda – particularly within the Directorate of Operations – from the late 1940s well into the 1970s.
He described the Bay of Pigs operation as an example of “unreflective activism” and argued the same tendency continued to influence which objectives the Agency pursued for years afterwards.
He also criticised the Agency’s “can-do” culture, saying that there was a strong belief difficult situations could be improved through determined action even where this confidence was not backed by the intelligence.
In Vietnam, for example, he cited a reluctance to accept limitations in the prospects of US pacification efforts as a contributing factor in operations continuing despite the actual prospects of achieving the intended result being lower than people wanted to believe.
Indicators
Action Bias may be affecting your work if doing something seems to be the default response and you and your superiors find waiting and exercising restraint uncomfortable. Look at how you are framing your assessments as well as the options you are presenting – if exercising restraint is regularly absent then action bias may be creeping in. Watch out for the following indicators:
You move prematurely from analysis to recommendations: You have only partially established what is happening, but are already assessing potential responses.
Exercising restraint is viewed as a failure to decide: Maintaining the current position is framed negatively as “doing nothing” or “passive” rather than a genuine option with potentially positive effects.
You feel pressure to make a product seem useful by recommending action: Remember that intelligence showing intervention is unnecessary or that evidence is not yet capable of supporting a decision is still useful.
You judge action and inaction differently: You focus on what a response is meant to achieve without giving similar attention to the negative consequences it might cause, and visa-versa for inaction.
The customer’s question is loaded: The question is framed as “What should we do?” rather than “Should we do anything?”, causing discussion to centre around what should be done rather than considering whether anything should be done at all.
You are asking for more collection without a clear purpose: Obtaining more information feels like progress, but you cannot explain what specific uncertainty you are trying to resolve or how the answer would change a decision.
Common Exploitation of Action Bias
Creating pressure to respond before you have had a chance to properly assess a situation is a common tactic for hostile actors exploiting Action Bias. By creating a sense of urgency it reduces the available time for properly judging the facts – if you believe waiting will exacerbate a situation you are likely to feel pressured into taking immediate action without properly thinking your decision through.
In an examination of the ransomware ecosystem, the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) highlighted the imposition of short payment deadlines – and the threat of causing further harm if they are not met – by cybercriminals who had stolen or encrypted a victim’s data as a key tactic in encouraging them to pay.
This places the victim in a difficult situation as their systems may be unavailable, disrupting normal operations and inflicting increasing financial damage. Paying the ransom offers an apparent immediate remedy that appears like it will end the problem.
The alert shown to victims of the WannaCry ransomware attack
However, this does not mean it will: during the 2017 WannaCry attack, victims were asked to pay to regain access to their systems. In its WannaCry guidance, the NCSC advised against doing this, noting that payment did not guarantee access to the encrypted data and it would be funding criminal activity.
Questions to Ask
If you suspect Action Bias is affecting your assessment, use these questions to determine whether action is genuinely necessary or whether internal or external pressure to act is influencing your judgement:
What happens if we take no action for now?
What evidence shows that intervention is likely to improve the outcome?
What could our response make worse?
When does the decision genuinely need to be made?
What would we learn by waiting, and would it change the decision?
Have we treated maintaining the current position as a real option?
Am I recommending action because the evidence supports it or because waiting feels uncomfortable?
Would I recommend the same response without pressure from the customer or senior leadership?
Are we asking for more intelligence because we need it, or because uncertainty itself is uncomfortable?
Could the other actor be creating urgency specifically to provoke a response?
Mitigation
A key defence against Action Bias is ensuring you are judging action and restraint by the same standard. Problems do not automatically require intervention, and waiting should not be automatically viewed as a failure to respond. The following actions can reduce the risk of Action Bias unduly influencing your assessments and recommendations:
Consider inaction as a genuine option: Compare maintaining the current position with the active responses being considered rather than just adding it as an afterthought. Identify indicators that would show it is working (or failing), and set a clear point for reassessment.
Assess all potential consequences: Consider the most likely and most dangerous outcomes of both active intervention and exercising restraint rather than just the intended ones.
Identify the real deadline: Taking time to establish how genuine apparent time pressure actually is can expose artificial deadlines, buying you precious time to conduct a more comprehensive assessment.
Give further collection a clear purpose: Make sure you have clearly identified the question that needs answering and whether it will actually benefit the decision-making process before requesting more intelligence.
Separate assessment from recommendation: Make sure you have fully established what is happening before recommending how to respond to it.
Review previous interventions: Look at previous interventions and assess whether they actually lead to improved outcomes or whether restraint would have been more beneficial.
Recommended Structural Analytical Techniques
The following techniques can help when pressure to respond is high or when taking action is beginning to look inevitable before its consequences or the consequences of exercising restraint have been properly assessed:
Courses of Action Analysis: Compare realistic responses using the same criteria and include maintaining the current position where appropriate. This stops the most active option from gaining an advantage just because it seems more decisive.
Premortem Analysis: Assume the proposed intervention has failed and work backwards to explain what went wrong. This can help to identify consequences that may be overlooked when your attention is too heavily focused on the intended result.
Wargaming: Explore how other actors could respond to your action. This is particularly useful when a precautionary move could be interpreted as threatening and trigger the behaviour you were trying to prevent.
Red Team Analysis: Ask another analyst or team to make the strongest reasonable case against immediate intervention. Their job is not to argue that you should always wait, but to test whether the case for acting is genuinely stronger.
Key Assumptions Check: Identify the assumptions behind the proposed response, including the belief that intervention is necessary. Test what happens to the recommendation if those assumptions turn out to be wrong.
