Feb 16th, 2007
Decision making isn’t always as rational as you think (or hope)
People are capable of making rational decisions, but the moment you introduce stress, that ability goes out the window. It’s already been demonstrated that being around friends can impair your memory, and now research shows that people lose the ability to perform calculations in stressful situations.
“People tend to have a hard time evaluating numbers, even when the numbers are clear and right in front of them,” Arvai said. “In contrast, the emotional responses that are conjured up by problems like terrorism and crime are so strong that most people don’t factor in the empirical evidence when making decisions.”
So we can’t remember things when we’re with people, and we can’t think clearly under stress. What chance do we have to make good decisions? Pretty good, actually. Gary Klein in his book Sources of Power studied people who made decisions in high-stress situations - fire chiefs, nurses, etc. What he found was that when placed in a high-stress situation (and any deadline situation is a high stress situation, even if that deadline is 6 months away), rather than listing alternatives and weighing possibilities, we came up with a scenario, ran through it looking for flaws, and then acted on it. The best way to train for these situations is to live through them, or to listen to the stories of people who have. This allows us to build a mental model of how things should go & identify, however subconsciously, when it’s going wrong.
Read: Decision making isn’t always as rational as you think (or hope) (via Crazy on Tap)
Worth investigating are Rigali’s Law and the more general Lovaglia’s Law.