christopher-hill.com

Blink

I went to a camping shop yesterday with Tim and one of the things we both needed to purchase was stove equipment. CCC have pretty much every make and model of camping stove available and every make and model of cooking equipment available. With every possible option available to us, it should have been fairly straightforward for two intelligent men to make a decision about the best purchase and buy accordingly.
We both left empty handed.
I raise this because the decision making process is the subject of a book I'm currently reading by Malcolm Gladwell called Blink. To try and break down the essence of the book, it is basically saying that out most valuable decision making process happens deep in our subconcious without us even being aware of it or what is driving it.
A good example of this was a fireman who was leading a team of firefighters tackling a blaze in a kitchen. They weren't making much progress and so had retreated to the lounge. The fireman suddenly turned and ordered his men out of the building as fast as possible. Seconds later the floor in the lounge that they had been standing on collapsed. The thing is, the fireman had absolutely no idea why he had ordered the men out and later attributed it to ESP. What had actually happened was that the subconcious decision making part of the brain been quietly analysing the entire situation. It was asking questions such as Why does the fire seem quieter than usual? Why is the heat in the next door room so much greater than you'd expect? Why are they struggling so hard to put out a kitchen fire? The answer to these questions was that because the fire was not in the kitchen, it was in the basement below. Had the firemen stood there and worked through these questions in a rational fashion they would be dead, but the lead firefighter's subconsious raised a red flag that saved their lives.
This rapid subconcious cognition is easily corrupted by both pumping the brain with too much information or by only listening to the decisions you want to hear. You may remember a few years back the highly publicised case of the vastly expensive war game staged by the US military to prototype a "new type of war". It was the Pentagon's belief that they had the technology to lift the fog of war, to see every facet of the battlefield and as such be an undefeatable military force. It was their belief that if you have access to every piece of information, you can't possibly lose. Except within a couple of days, their virtual forces had been defeated; countless virtual war ships had been sunk, tens of thousands of men had been killed, and all this was inflicted by an enemy equiped with small boats and men sending messages about on motorbikes. The decision making process of the Pentagon had become so bogged down and corrupted by irrelevant information that they were simply unable to respond to the chaotic and unexpected tactics of the general that had been tasked with role-playing the enemy.
After a few days of head scratching, the virtual ships were refloated and the commander of the enemy forces was told that he wasn't allowed to sink any ships or prevent any soldiers landing or basically do anything that might, you know, enable him to win, and only then were the US military able to achieve victory. The war game was deamed a great success and a great leap forward in modern warfare. A year later, they invaded Iraq. Mission Accomplished.
What the war game actually showed was that if you provide too much information, the part of the brain that is capable of remarkable feats of rapid cognition simply becomes paralised. It is the same paralysis experienced by me and Tim in the camping shop. There's actually been tests done. Psychologist Sheena Iyengar set up an experiment in a grocery store in California. Two stalls were set up to sell jam. One stall had 6 types of jam, the other had 24. The store with fewer varieties of jam sold to 30% of customers. The store with the most sold to just 3% of customers. Customers were simply overwhelmed with choice and walked away.
So my advise, if you want cheap and cheerful camping equipment go to Decathlon. If you want pricier but better quality equipment go to Blacks. You'll have much less choice available, but at least you'll be able to make a decision.

Monday, May 29, 2006 10:28 AM