Pharmaceutical leaders bear the responsibility of making countless high-pressure decisions. The course of action they decide will be based on years of experience, hard-earned skills and expertise, and no little instinct. It’s rare that anyone finds themselves in this position by accident, but even experienced pharma leaders are as prone as anyone to confirmation bias. In this blog post, we’ll explore how confirmation bias could be impacting your launch strategy – and what you can do about it.
What is confirmation bias?
When faced with a problem to solve or a job to do, we all bring our own expectations and preconceived ideas to the table. We can’t help it: that’s just how human neurology works. The issue is that these preconceived ideas can impact how we make decisions and how we analyze information, biasing outcomes. Even the most experienced pharma leader is susceptible to this unconscious ‘stacking of the deck’ – psychologists call the phenomenon ‘confirmation bias’.
“Confirmation bias occurs from the direct influence of desire on beliefs. When people would like a certain idea or concept to be true, they end up believing it to be true. They are motivated by wishful thinking. This error leads the individual to stop gathering information when the evidence gathered so far confirms the views or prejudices one would like to be true.”
How can ‘confirmation bias’ affect launch strategy?
Confirmation bias might affect your enjoyment of a new movie, how you feel about a social situation, or how you interpret current events. It’s unsurprising, then, that confirmation bias can also influence our professional lives. In 2025, an Impatient Health survey of pharma leaders found that 42% of teams simply ignore market signals they don’t expect to see. That’s confirmation bias in action, and it skews our perception of ‘the truth’ and how it relates to launch strategy.
“A lot of companies make assumptions, but then never validate those assumptions. I might assume that if a patient is already injecting themselves with insulin, then they’re not going to mind injecting my drug. Whereas in reality, the patient feels they can’t handle another injection.”
– Tony Page, SVP of Insight Analytics, Within3
Confirmation bias takes this theory a step further. It’s not just a case of making assumptions and acting on them without validation – It’s a case of overindexing evidence that supports those assumptions, while ignoring evidence that contradicts it. Making decisions based on biased thinking or incomplete information can cause launch strategies to fall flat.
Confirmation bias can also cause launch teams to fall back on familiar or ‘safe’ approaches, when a new methodology may be required. Impatient Health research shows how just 37% of pharma leaders agree that strategic changes occur in the majority of drug launches. Put simply, once a launch strategy is in motion, most teams continue full speed ahead regardless of any market signals to the contrary. So much momentum has built up, so much effort and time have been invested, that it must work, as it has in the past. Pharma teams prefer to fall back on methodologies they’ve used in the past – regardless of whether or not there’s any evidence they work. Impatient Health refers to such methodologies as “tried and trusted,” vs. “tried and tested.”
Overcoming confirmation bias
The first step in overcoming confirmation bias is to be aware of the concept itself. Watch for evidence of confirmation bias in your own thinking: what outcomes are you expecting, and what outcomes do you want to see? The University of California suggests trying falsification bias instead – “actively look for evidence that disproves your point of view.” Other tips include encouraging diverse perspectives and seeking alternate viewpoints, or applying structured decision-making processes to help you stress-test any planned course of action.
As a pharma leader, it’s your job to make the decisions that matter, and ultimately, you need to be able to trust that your instincts will see you through. But before any decision can be made, you owe it to yourself, your team, and the success of your launch to equip yourself with the clearest possible view of the landscape. Today, that means real-time, integrated intelligence. Within3 Launch Intelligence™ combines field activity, HCP engagement, social sentiment, claims data, and more to create a real-time, decision-ready market view. Having the right signals at your fingertips empowers you to make informed, unbiased decisions – fine-tuned by your own instinct and expertise. A robust Launch Intelligence™ platform helps to eliminate cognitive bias by providing you with the most complete, up-to-date information possible so you can make your decisions based on evidence, not assumptions.
Experience it for yourself. Book a demo of Within3 Launch intelligence™ today.
