Wednesday, June 13, 2012

Insights of Snap Judgement

Taking decisions involving emotions is like solving an open ended problem, in either case we don't get a logical concrete solution. I feel avoiding such situations are almost impossible. Most of the time this involves snap judgement without much details of the context. Psychologists working on subconscious mind say somehow brain got a system developed to function in such situations and we should not interfere with that. As  Malcolm Gladwell has written in his book Blink "Introspection destroys the ability to solve insight problems. Introspection messes up with our reactions." It's simple we can not always rationalize and explain our feelings. e.g Why we are attracted to someone, why we  like certain food etc.

The system in brain is reliable most of the time but not always, such error are called Warren Harding Error. One more example is  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amadou_Diallo_shooting. A different flavor of this error is volume of info may always not help, best example is divorce, despite the fact that people collect lot of fact on  their spouse.

Difficulty here is, when, what and how much info to collect. Even if want, it may not be possible all the time because of time constraint and complexity of understanding the opponents intention.

Conclusion:
Need to rely on the system brain already has. The core of that system is Implicit Association, so we can work on this, read more, observe more, listen carefully..........