[lit-ideas] Re: Unconscious Thought
- From: "John McCreery" <john.mccreery@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sun, 26 Feb 2006 23:43:52 +0900
Before you get too excited about this, I would strongly recommend a
look at Gary Klein (1998) _Sources of Power: How People Make
Decisions_. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Klein has worked for years on how people in time-pressured situations
make decisions. His subjects include firemen as well as tank
commanders and other military types (the military, whose leaders have
a strong interest in dealing with the fog ot war have a strong
interest in this type of research).
Klein's critique of traditional rational choice models of decision
making is that people in time-pressured situations simply don't have
the time to do what the rational choice model describes: carefully lay
out alternatives, develop and weight a list of factors relevant to
choosing among them, assign scores to the alternatives for each of the
relevant factors, then calculate the best possible choice.
Instead, Klein develops a theory of what he calls recognition-primed
decision making. This theory envisions the decision maker as entering
a situation equipped with a stack of potentially relevant cognitive
models. Scanning the situation, he grabs the first one that seems to
make sense and proceeds to act on it while continuing to scan the
environment for evidence that supports or contradicts his choice. So
long as the model appears to work, he continues to act on it. If
incoming evidence indicates that the model is wrong, he grabs the
next, apparently more plausible one. This process continues until (1)
the situation is resolved or (2) he runs out of models. In the kinds
of situations Klein studies, (2) implies that he and those who depend
on his decisions will be lucky to get out alive.
An interesting implication of Klein's work (one to which he himself
points clearly) is that it explains very nicly the role and importance
of experience. More experience means having more possible models and
and better developed skills for identifying the relevant ones. Which
is why, for example, the Army is right to recommend to young, green
first lieutenants that they seek and follow the advice of the
seasoned noncoms with whom they share command of platoons. As an
officer, the lieutenant has the right (and sometimes responsibility)
to overule his sergeant, but the sergeant, drawing on his greater
experience, is, on average, far more likely to be right.
These conclusions should be no surprise to anyone who has ever played
a game or sport or tried to run an organization when time pressure is
important. The soccer player who stops to rationally calculate where
best to kick the ball is unlikely to score a goal. Those who score are
most likely to be those who have practiced to the point that sizing up
the field situation and kicking in the right direction has become, as
we say "second nature." The salesman who persists in droning through
the rational arguments for his proposition when his customer has
already accepted or rejected the sale is unlikely to make many sales.
The good ones, mostly those with lots of experience, can turn on a
dime in response to changes in customer mood.
What both Klein and everyday experience point to isn't "Go with your
gut." It's "Go with your gut only after you've worked really hard to
make sure that your gut knows what it's doing."
--
John McCreery
The Word Works, Ltd.
55-13-202 Miyagaya, Nishi-ku
Yokohama 220-0006, JAPAN
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