It’s intuitive. When you’ve got an important decision to make, and the stakes are high, you want to gather as much information as you can about the issue, right? You may have to rethink that strategy. If you want to make better decisions, stop the exhaustive research! A study published in Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications reveals that most people’s decision-making skills actually drop off as more and more facts enter the equation.
“It’s counterintuitive, because we all like to think we use information wisely to make smart decisions,” says Samantha Kleinberg, a computer scientist and the Farber Chair Associate Professor at the Stevens Institute of Technology, in a media release. “But the reality is that when it comes to information, more isn’t necessarily better.”
Kleinberg and her research team created simple diagrams, called causal models, during their study. The diagrams show how different factors interact to yield desired outcomes. She described one hypothetical scenario – how aliens square off at a dance party. Most people can reason effectively about such models because they do not have any biases or preconceptions about alien dance-offs. People make good decisions because they focus on the information that they are given, she explained.
The researchers’ working hypothesis was that in everyday scenarios, such as how to make healthy decisions about nutrition, people’s ability to reason effectively escapes them.
“We think people’s prior knowledge and beliefs distracts them from the causal model in front of them. If I’m reasoning about what to eat, for instance, I might have all kinds of preconceptions about the best things to eat — and that makes it harder to effectively use the information that I’m presented,” Kleinberg continues.
To verify that hypothesis, Kleinberg and co-author Jessecae Marsh, a cognitive psychologist at Lehigh University, investigated how people’s decision-making varies when presented with different kinds of causal models of real-life issues. Some of these included buying a house, managing body weight, picking a college, and others. Their experiments quickly demonstrated that people know how to use causal models, but even a very simple model was useless when nonessential details were added to the essential facts.
“What’s really remarkable is that even a tiny amount of surplus information has a big negative effect on our decision-making,” Kleinberg says. “If you get too much information, your decision-making quickly becomes as bad as if you’d gotten no information at all.”
For example, if a causal model shows that eating salty food raises your blood pressure but also shows unrelated information, such as drinking water makes you less thirsty, it is harder for people to make effective choices about the best way to manage their health. When Kleinberg’s team removed the extraneous details and highlighted the vital information, the participants quickly recovered their ability to make good decisions.
“That’s significant because it shows that the problem isn’t just that people are overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of information — it’s more that they’re struggling to figure out which parts of the model they should be paying attention to,” Kleinberg explains.
These findings have significant implications across all aspects of life. It means there may be a need to reconsider the process of critical thinking and education in general.
“If you’re giving people a laundry list of things to consider when they’re deciding whether to wear a facemask or get a COVID test, or what to eat or drink, then you’re actually making it harder for them to make good decisions,” the researcher adds.
Source: https://studyfinds.org/make-better-decisions-less-info/
