For hundreds of years, people have been blaming strange behavior on the full moon. In the Middle Ages, people claimed that a full moon could turn humans into werewolves. It was common in the 1700s to believe that a full moon could cause epilepsy or spikes in temperatures. The impact of the moon was so prevalent that it impacted our language. The word lunatic originates from the Latin root luna, which means the moon.

Today, we have (for the most part) come to our senses. While we no longer blame illness and infection on the moon phases, we may still hear people use it to explain outrageous behavior. A familiar story in medical circles is that during a chaotic evening at the hospital, one of the nurses will say, “Must be a full moon tonight.” While there’s little evidence to suggest that a full moon impacts our behaviors, a 2005 study reported that 7 out of 10 nurses still thought that “a full moon led to more chaos and patients that night.”

What in the moon is going on here!?

It’s not that the nurses who maintain that a full moon causes strange behavior are foolish. They are merely falling victim to a mental error that plagues all of us. Psychologists regard this little brain blunder as an “illusory correlation.” Here’s how it works and how it might be impacting you.

An illusory correlation occurs when we mistakenly over-emphasize one experience and ignore others. For example, let’s say you visit a major metropolitan area, and someone cuts you off in traffic. Then, you go to a restaurant, and the server is rude to you. Finally, you ask someone on the street for directions, and they hardly acknowledge your existence.

When you reflect on your trip, it is natural to remember these experiences and conclude that “people in big cities are rude.” However, in drawing this conclusion, you overlook all of the meals where the waiter wasn’t rude or the thousands of people you passed on the road who didn’t cut you off (or the ones that YOU cut-off).

Here’s where the science of our brain comes into play: hundreds of studies have proven that our minds tend to exaggerate the significance of events we can easily recall and minimize the significance of the ones we have difficulty remembering. This bias seems to be an unfortunate by-product of how our minds normally process information in the world. There are just some things that our minds remember more readily, and the easier it is for us to remember, the more likely we are to conceive a strong correlation between two weakly related or unrelated things. And there’s the problem, most of us are unaware of how selective our memory can be.

Once you’re aware of this common mental error, your first response might be something like, “I need to stop this from happening! How can I block my brain from doing these things?!?” It’s a reasonable question, but not quite that simple. Remember, illusory correlations happen as a by-product of how our brain naturally works. There are many aspects of everyday life where the same processes that lead us to faulty conclusions can serve us well. We don’t want to eliminate these thinking mechanisms; we want to hone them and hold ourselves accountable to making the right connections. To do this, we should invest in two things.

Self-Awareness
If we’re serious about getting better at this, one of the first steps is to recognize where we stand. Self-awareness—often overlooked in business settings—is the foundation for great leadership. Practices like journaling, meditating, and general reflective thinking have been shown to increase our capacity to identify our limitations and motivations and improve our ability to think through decisions critically (rather than react impulsively). When we make correlations between events and start to draw conclusions about situations or people, it may help to explore whether we’re remembering the whole story or only parts of it.

Our Team
An old Hebrew proverb states, “The wise surround themselves with wise, but a companion of fools suffers harm.” Who we surround ourselves with, and the ability we give them to speak into our lives, can make or break our leadership. We should invest in the people around us, provide them with unrestricted access to question our thinking, and encourage them to ask how we came to conclusions or decisions. This will provide us with greater accountability to results.

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From Thought To Action: As you draw conclusions or make connections this week, stop for long enough to ask yourself if you are seeing the whole picture.