My oldest daughter starts kindergarten this week, and because I’m that parent, she will enter having already endured a battery of first-grade-level worksheets. It’s a playbook that’s rooted in my long-held belief that early academic success begets future achievement.

But relying on any kind of playbook feels a bit silly at the moment. Generative AI has shattered conventional wisdom about what it takes to succeed—especially in school, where ChatGPT has teachers scrambling to figure out how to teach and test.

Even still, I’m sticking with the workbooks—with the familiar. It’s a behavior I share with many people.

Research from Kellogg’s Yuval Salant and Jörg Spenkuch finds that we do, indeed, tend to rely on past strategies of what’s worked for us, even in new situations where a fresh approach might be better. Luckily, being aware of this inclination can help us make more-informed decisions in unfamiliar contexts.

Plus: Are judges biased or just random?

No country for old memories

When we have a critical decision to make, it’s natural to lean on our memory. But what happens when we find ourselves in new or unfamiliar situations?

To explore this question, Spenkuch and Salant turned to Chess960, a variant of traditional chess where the starting position of pieces in the back row are scrambled—making it very impractical to use moves from memory.

Still, the economists found that first-time players used opening moves from their memory roughly twice as often as moves that they had not played before. This was true even in cases where the memory-based moves proved to be objectively worse.

“Memory retrieval is something that should work on average,” Salant says. “The surprise is that we keep using this heuristic even when the situation is very different.”

Businesses may also share this tendency to favor what worked in the past. For example, Uber’s initial attempt to expand in Germany rested on an approach that had worked well for it in the United States. It entered markets without legal permission, ballooned its audience, and cajoled local officials into negotiating agreements for the company to stay there.

But that didn’t work in Germany, where local officials had very little leverage. So Uber had to leave the market until it could hammer out the appropriate legal framework.

“When you extrapolate market entry in one environment to market entry in a different culture or geography, if you only rely on what you did in the past, that may backfire on you,” Salant says. “Not all markets are created equal or similar.”

Read more in Kellogg Insight.

Coin flip or justice?

On a related note: How do judges make decisions, anyway?

Centuries of legal research have shown that their rulings are often based on bias, chance, or other nonlegal considerations.

Alvaro Sandroni, a professor of managerial economics and decision sciences at Kellogg, worked with colleague Leo Katz to determine if game theory could provide a less-cynical explanation.

Their game-theory model produced a surprising takeaway: because of the types of cases that reach trial, it often makes sense for judges to rule at random.

Attorneys often settle easy cases out of court to avoid wasting resources on an outcome that was clear from the beginning.

Building from that assumption, only hard cases reach court, where a rational judge doesn’t need to pay attention and can rule arbitrarily. But if litigants know that’s happening, they will bring more easy cases to trial, hoping to win the “coin flip.” And because judges want to avoid making errors, they will start paying attention again.

Eventually, this push and pull reaches an equilibrium where a mix of hard and easy cases goes to court, the researchers observed, which opens up room for judicial bias.

Though that conclusion questions the ideal of impartial judges, Sandroni says that this phenomenon is a positive sign for the legal system

“We’re saying that if the judges get into a situation where there is nothing more to be done apart from flipping a coin, that’s a sign that the system is working.”

Read more in Kellogg Insight.