ART VALERO / CORBIS
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Merck & Co. was at the height of an epic pharmaceuticals boom. Annual sales doubled and profits tripled, most notably driven by sales of a congestive heart failure treatment that hit the billion-dollar mark just three years after its 1985 introduction. In 1993, Fortune magazine named Merck America’s “most admired” company—for the seventh year in a row. Despite the company’s unparalleled success, Merck was not immune to the common cognitive biases that can subtly influence everyday research decisions.
Merck employees, for example, were overly confident that they had the best way of bringing new products to market. “They believed so strongly in themselves and in their hunches about these drugs that they could get themselves to just totally ...
