Rowan's Future of Choice

quickpost #4: 60 seconds from the top of my mind

Listen closely the next time someone voices his opinion on something. It will often be based on a single, personal experience. For example, "I once owned one of those and it never worked." He has decided the product is flawed, now and forever. Or, "She is unreliable because she forgot to do something for me a couple of years ago." This implies she is chronically unreliable, and will continue to be so.

How quickly we judge. How little thought goes into most of our choices.

If you find yourself forming an opinion based on one instance, try this: Think of a similar situation--without carrying over any bias--and compare the two. Tell me if your first opinion holds up.

Catching my attention

Reading this morning about the Google Corporation's new business offering, "Apps for Your Domain," something dawned on me my wife has been saying for years: I should start paying more attention.

The article said the search/platform company is offering qualified customers Gmail accounts without ads (what they call sponsored links.) I am thinking, I don't have any ads in my Gmail, why is that? Am I "qualified," whatever that means?

Well, I just checked. Two-and-a-half inches out of my 10-inch wide window are in fact ads (25%). I just never ever noticed. Or at least my conscious mind never noticed. Hello!

                

Google Apps for Your Domain

quickpost #3: 60 seconds from the top of my mind

The more we know, and the more time we have to think about it, means the filters we use to process all the available information are no longer time, access, and quality. It doesn't matter how deep or effective the search is. The filters are our values and goals. Knowing what we care about and what has meaning for us is the final adjudicator for our most important decisions. The rest is noise and should be treated as such.

Deliberation-without-attention

It is interesting to see how a research finding seeps from academia through the mainstream media to become something that people might actually talk about.

Or maybe not.

A Boston Globe writer took a fairly no-brainer study reported in Science and Nature magazines, created a graphic (click to enlarge) to portray the study finding, and printed a story in the Globe. This and the magazine articles were picked up by me and several other bloggers and journalists. Now I am talking about it....

The research finding is basically this: after considering all the relevant information, gut feelings are better suited for complex decisions than for simple decisions.

In other words, go with your gut when making the final decision on what house to buy. Ignore the zombies when choosing what socks to wear.

My zombie is telling me right now that this is a lot of hooey. What do you think?

Links: Boston Globe story, Science magazine (requires subscription), Nature.

quickpost #2: 60 seconds from the top of my mind

Christmas decorations came down today, boxed and ready for next time, which feels like next week. Santa and I nearly flew off the roof, the wind was so hard, gusting. Took my daughter to Old Navy to re-make someone else's decision, make an exchange. Personal ah-ha that one moment can be perfect and happy and memorable, even if moments surrounding it can be sad or dull or even terrible. Like Vonnegut's Billy Pilgrim, time tripping again.

Stop making sense

Can we learn how to deal with uncertainty, as Gerd Gigerenzer argues in my 1/11/06 post? Or does Andy Clark have it right: we are designed to avoid--not accommodate--uncertainty.

"It now seems clear that many of my major life and work decisions are made very rapidly, often on the basis of ecologically sound but superficial cues, with slow deliberative reason busily engaged in justifying what the quick-thinking zombies inside me have already laid on the table. The good news is that without these mechanisms we'd be unable to engage in fluid daily life or reason at all, and that very often they are right. The dangerous truth, though, is that we are indeed designed to cut conscious, aware choice out of the picture wherever possible."

What is your dangerous idea? One of mine is that the end of the first "Men in Black" movie was indeed factual. (Zooming back from Earth into distant space...)

--Excerpt from Andy Clark's response to the 2006 Edge question — "What is your dangerous idea?"

Photo of David Byrne, 1983.

quickpost #1: 60 seconds from the top of my mind

we don't need help deciding. need decisions made for us. don't want to think about it too much, or at all. want every decision to come out well. if life says we must have bad decisions, we want them to come with no costs, or costs too low to care. better yet, someone else pays. want others to do what we say. want others to stop telling us what to do, unless they are sure fire right and there is a no questions return policy. want more time. want less time. done

Thinking about the un-thinkable

We often decide "in the dark." We make decisions within social relationships that precede thought and logic. We make decisions before we know they exist.

To improve decisions made in such a dark place, we have "re-think" the un-thinkable. This begins by understanding more about our social selves.

From Harvard's John Clippinger:

"Eighty percent of language is really concerned not with conveying logical relationships, but with conveying social relationships…. Some of the things we do are really non-conscious. They are triggered by certain kinds of signals, and we respond automatically. In other cases we can reflect about it…we can construct new ways of doing it…."

The quote comes 18 minutes and 47 seconds into a podcast produced by ITConversations. Link. John's audio was recorded at the Supernova 2005 conference. A Senior Fellow of The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School, he spoke about his work at Socialphysics.org, whose goal is "to help create a new commons, the 'social web.'

Do bodily states guide decision-making?

Carnegie Mellon University doctoral student Tiago V. Maia and James L. McClelland, the Walter Van Dyke Bingham Professor of Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience, published a study that:

"...examines the somatic marker hypothesis, which states that when an individual faces a decision, each alternative elicits a bodily state – a somatic marker – that corresponds to an emotional reaction. According to the hypothesis, these markers influence decision-making and can guide the individual to make an advantageous choice even in the absence of conscious knowledge to guide the decision. The somatic marker hypothesis was proposed by neurologist Antonio Damasio in his best-selling book, 'Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain.'"
Link

I want what he wants

What prompts us to end deliberation and finally decide? It is often caused because we “run out of runway.” Time’s up. The alarm has sounded. The deadline has arrived. At other times, the prompt is unrelated to time. Consider this story: 

A man pursues and is offered a job with a small company. The new position is challenging and offers better pay, but the small size of the company is risky. His current job with a large company is stable, interesting, and nearly risk free. Upon thinking it over, the man decides to keep his current position, and offers it to a friend and business associate who would be a perfect fit. The friend expresses enthusiasm for learning more about the opening. A mere four hours later, the man reverses his earlier decision, and accepts the new position with the small company.