losing meaning and well-being through information

in his new book blink, malcom gladwell writes:

...even the most complicated of relationships and problems have an identifiable pattern. ...overloading the decision makers with information makes picking up that signature harder, not easer. To be a successful decision maker, we have to edit.

this reminds me of a a study i read last month (pdf) in psychological science that hints at why we're so bad at decisions involving too much information. researchers at the university of queensland handed a group of academics information on the interaction between variables, and asked them to make a judgment requiring synthesis of the relationships.

synthesizing three variables was difficult, and more left the academics dumfounded:

“At the level of the four-way interactions, participants made comments such as “Everything fell apart and I had to go back”,” Professor Halford said.

a fashionable critique of the market is that it provides too much choice - i.e., too many variables to consider. consumers can become overwhelmed, and barry schwartz's book paradox of choice claims this leads to "bad decisions, to anxiety, stress, and dissatisfaction - even to clinical depression."

although by no means a scholarly work, gladwell's book is important in highlighting the counterintuitive observation that economizing is key in decision making, and it seems that process can alleviate some of the supposed psychological harms of the market. halford et. al have told us exactly how far we should go with the information we do use.

from all this we know we must economize, and by how much. now we need someone to tell us how to determine which variables to include in our analyses. i'm inclined to say that reviews are key here. for example, when purchasing a car i can test drive every car on the market and keep accurate record of my observations. my working memory will then overload and my mind will "drop" all of my mental bundles, leaving me tired, frustrated, and confused. a smarter option would be to pick up consumer reports and car & driver. they have done some of the filtering for me, and i can instead focus on a few key criteria.

the ironic part for market critics is that these filtering mechanisms are demanded by consumers, and provided via the free market, to help ameliorate the harms they critique.

[the tile of this post is derived from a quote by military genius paul van riper: "in the act of tearing something apart, you lose its meaning."]

reference: halford, gs, rosemary, b, mccredden, je, and bain, jd. "how many variables can humans process?" psychological science, january 2005

Labels: decision making, well being