- These experiments all highlight the same psychological trap. People view the mind as a rational arbiter, assuming that they and others will withhold judgment until they finish flipping through all the evidence. But the mind isn’t just a passive information processor; it’s also emotional. In reality, once people begin to experience that evidence in real time, they will inevitably react to it as they go along. We won’t need to see later information if we already love or hate the very first piece.
Tversky and Kahneman first studied the paradox of choice in '79. Ariely built on it for half his career. The psychological argument is that when we have a lot of choices we have to evaluate all those choices and evolutionarily, we're driven to answer questions quickly for the sake of survival. What I don't like about this analysis is it is framed in terms of "make your decision" rather than "how we make decisions." for example: That's an evaluation made every day, over and over again. It's not appropriate to describe it as a one-and-done. I also don't like how the universe is being shaped to fit the study: "You never get a second chance to make a first impression" certainly hasn't been an aphorism since the Farmer's Almanac or anything. Yes, we use less information to make decisions than we think. There was a Nobel Prize in Economics for this. We also remake those decisions frequently with new information. For better or worse, we also have an ownership bias - if we possess it, we like it more - and a sour grapes bias, whereby if we didn't decide on it we reinforce our decision with any new information. All of which makes for a more nuanced and complicated situation than a B-school associate professor is willing to admit.How many good performances would convince you that you have hired the right person?
People view the mind as a rational arbiter, assuming that they and others will withhold judgment until they finish flipping through all the evidence.
So your issue is not with the central result result of the study (regardless of whether it's a novel conclusion), but rather that the study itself is overly simplistic and leads to the results rather than reveals them? By asking participants to stop at the 'very first point when they make up their minds', you're predisposing them to make a decision on as small amount of information as possible. It doesn't matter that they have to see the whole set of judgement criteria anyway. The study simply instructs the subjects to make a decision, not necessarily an accurate one. And all this leads to an inevitable conclusion that doesn't actually do anything to expand on the why or how of our decision making. Is that correct? I'm not questioning your views, just rewording them back at you to solidify my own understanding. Maybe it would've been interesting to ask the subjects whether they still stuck to their original decision after seeing the rest of the data.
My argument is that the title of the article - and the conclusions of the study - don't really get to the heart of the psychology of choice. I would also argue that the author uses a straw-man to make his point - "People think they analyze everything a lot but they actually don't" - when in fact the gut-check you're going to get out of most people is that decisions are hard and we lose rationality very quickly. This is the core argument of behavioral economics as a science - economics supposes rational actors while behavioral economics tests and evaluates the performance of irrational humans in economic situations. By contrast, the article is arguing that people are totally rational, it's just that we second-guess ourselves until we're stupid ("Your tenth sip of a juice will probably taste like the first"). Even then, the model is dumb. Your tenth sip of juice won't taste like your first because taste is a chemical process and taste receptors run out of supply. Your evaluation of your employee is going to be context-sensitive depending on what's going on at work. The authors are arguing that you should make a snap decision and stick with it while also being aware that other people make snap decisions and stick with it when in fact, the process of decision-making is a rational approach based on a non-obvious evaluation tree. I think they wanted to say something unsupported by evidence so they designed a flawed study that would give them the result they wanted. Do people overestimate their decision-making process? No, people don't understand their decision making process and this study doesn't help. This stuff is crazy interesting to me because when you consider the world is run by economists - and when you consider that they're demonstrably wrong about what drives economics - you see an opportunity for some insight into the world. And to me, your article boils down to "stop thinking so much" which misses the point.