“Decision making isn’t always easy, and sometimes we make errors on seemingly trivial tasks, especially if multiple sources of information compete for our attention,” said first author Tobias Teichert, Ph.D., assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh. “We have identified a novel mechanism that is surprisingly effective at improving response accuracy.”
That mechanism requires that a decision-maker do nothing — just briefly.
7 comments:
I found this article by Janice Wood about the benefits of slightly delaying decisions to be very interesting. I appreciate Tobias Teichert’s example of a driver’s response to traffic lights to illustrate the concept of targets and distractors. While most of the decisions I make every day do not require such immediate types of responses, this is a good analogy to keep in mind when a situation does require a quick and accurate response. From what I can gather, the “do nothing – just briefly” mechanism is akin to taking a moment to focus/center awareness, and then go with a ‘gut’ reaction. The next time my head is spinning with options, I hope I remember to try this exercise to remove distractors!
This I've noticed in myself a lot. When people ask me questions, especially on a job, I have ingrained it in myself to take a pause before answering. Some people think I look less confident when I do that. Some people also say I look like I don't know what I'm doing. Although it may look at that, I find I make better and more accurate decisions. And that makes it worth it because there are less things to redo.
To me it makes sense that pausing for a moment before making a decision would improve accuracy, since going with your gut reaction isn't always the most prudent thing to do. The article didn't specifically make the connection, but I wonder if this is essentially looking at the difference between a split second, gut reaction versus actually using some kind of critical reasoning to make a decision (that "slight delay"). I could definitely also see an argument for not going too far with the delay, however, since sometimes overthinking something can lead to second guessing and cause more problems than it solves.
I see a lot of this in myself. For me, I think it's a processing delay issue, where it takes a second after receiving vocal instructions (or written ones) to process them into a format that I can respond to. This sometimes makes it seem like I'm not paying attention or didn't understand, but neither of those things are the case. With me, it's not a willful choice to slightly delay a response, but a necessary component of how my brain works. When I don't take that second, half the time I come out with something completely irrelevant or incomprehensible. I will say that, as I get older it's becoming less of a problem, because I'm able to self-correct more, and keep up with my own brain.
I don’t understand the science behind this decision making study, but I have empirical data that supports its conclusions.
Personally, I tend to delay important decisions half as long as possible. It gives me half of my decision-making window to think about it, and the other half as a buffer in case I change my mind or something else comes up.
In general, I know that I, as well as others, could definitely benefit from thinking before making some choices sometimes.
This article is interesting in the sense that it breaks down how long the delay needs to be for an effective decision, but other than that little fact, I find this article to be fairly intuitive. I feel like we're taught since we're pretty young that you should wait to make a decision and if you think about things before you do them, you typically get better results. This seems just like a very scientific justification of that very simple principle.
I think this makes a lot of sense. People often get too caught up in the moment and instead of giving a well thought out opinion, say the first thing that comes to their mind. I once went to a program at a quaker school where the meeting process requires you not only to wait minutes in between comments but also not to reply back to previous comment made. I felt like the people in the meeting were a lot more open and insightful because of it.
Post a Comment