Deliberation without attention actually produced better results as the decisions became more complex.įrom there, however, the researchers take a big leap. Compared with those who said they had deliberated long and hard, shoppers who bought with little conscious deliberation felt less happy with their simple clothing purchase but happier with the complex furniture purchases. In other studies, Dijksterhuis surveyed people shopping for clothes (‘simple’ products) and furniture (‘complex’ products). In this case, conscious deliberation led to inferior discrimination and poor decisions. The opposite pattern emerged when people considered 12 criteria. Those who were distracted and thus unable to deliberate had to rely on their unconscious thinking and did less well. Among participants who considered four attributes, those who were allowed to engage in undistracted deliberative thought did better at discriminating between the best and worst cars. In one, participants assessed the quality of four hypothetical cars by considering either four attributes (a simple task) or 12 attributes (a complex task). The seemingly counterintuitive conclusion is that although conscious thought enhances simple decisions, the opposite holds true for more complex decisions.ĭijksterhuis reports four Simple but elegant studies supporting this argument. On the other hand, unconscious decision making (what the author refer to as ‘deliberation without attention’) requires no cognitive resources, so task complexity does not Effectiveness. In short, complex decisions overrun our cognitive powers. Because increasingly complex decisions place increasing strain on those resources, the quality of our decisions declines as their complexity increases. Its core argument is that to be effective, conscious (deliberative) decision making requires cognitive resources. In fact, a growing body of work suggests that in many situations simply ‘snap’ decisions with being routinely superior to more complex ones – an idea that gained widespread public appeal with Malcolm Gladwell’s best-selling book Blink (2005).Īn article by Ap Dijksterhuis of the University of Amsterdam and his colleagues, Making the Right Choice: the Deliberation-without-attention Effect’, runs very much in the spirit of Gladwell’s influential text. In general, however, organizational and political science offers little evidence that complex decisions fare better than simpler ones. However, examination of these historical events by Peter Suedfield, a psychologist at the University of British Columbia, and Roderick Kramer, a psychologist at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, found little difference in the two decision-making processes both crises required and received complex consideration by the political administration, but later only the second one was deemed to be the effective. One foreign affair decision made by a well-known US political leader in the 1960s is typically held us as an example of the perils of inadequate thought, whereas his successful handling of a water crisis is cited as an example of the advantages of careful deliberation. Decisions made without thorough canvassing, surveying, weighing, examining and reexamining relevant information and options would be suboptimal and often disastrous. In particular, the ‘conflict model’ of decision making proposed by psychologists Irving Janis and Leon Mann in their 1977 book, Decision Making, argued that a complex decision-making process is essential for guarding individuals and groups from the peril of ‘group-think’. Ever since the notion of a ‘Gordian solution’ has referred to the attractiveness of a simple answer to an otherwise intractable problem.Īmong researchers in the psychology of decision making, however, such solutions have traditionally held little appeal. Alexander, the famous ruler of the Greeks in the ancient world, simply took out his sword and cut it in two – then went on to conquer Asia. The story continues that when confronted with this problem, rather than deliberating on how to untie the Gordian knot. Unfortunately, the knot proved impossible to untie. It was said that the first person to untie it would become the king of Asia. Research explores when we can make a vital decision quickly and we need to proceed more deliberatelyĪ widely recognised legend tells us that in Gordium (in what is now Turkey) in the fourth century BC an oxcart was roped to a pole with a complex knot.
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