Unthink Complexity

When young children were presented a challenge in which 60% of the time, at random, getting the reward required opening the door on the left and 40% of the time, opening the door on the right, the young children soon came to always open the door on the left. When Yale University undergraduates were given a parallel challenge, they pondered for a pattern in what was randomness, wasting brain power and obtaining a success rate significantly lower than the 60%.
     This finding makes a case for jettisoning pondering. That argument is supported by psychologist Daniel Kahneman, who says that what we call “intuition” consists of subconscious shortcuts when we’re faced with complexity.
     He also shows that our biases can lead us to believe our intuition paid off when it actually sabotaged us. Those shortcuts are not always useful. Fretting less about a decision works best if we know the topic thoroughly. The danger with the familiar is over-analysis.
     Researchers find that we try to make things complicated when we consider the topic to be important. We want to make important decisions complex. Researchers at University of Florida and University of Pennsylvania nicknamed this phenomenon “decision quicksand” because of a peculiar way it operates: The more important the highly familiar decision, the more likely we are to succumb. And then the more time we spend pondering, the more important the decision becomes to us. It takes effort to pull out of this loop.
     Study participants were assigned to set up an air travel itinerary. Some were given the flight information in a small, low-contrast font which was hard to read. The others received the information in an easy-to-read larger, high-contrast font. Those with the harder task ended up saying they considered the assignment to be more important than did those in the “easy” group. And this difference was more pronounced among study participants who had been told at the start that the task was unimportant rather than important.
     Researchers at Radboud University in the Netherlands and at Northwestern University discovered that beyond an initial assessment period, the more time consumers spent evaluating alternatives, the less satisfying they found their eventual choices to be. As a retailer, you’re a consumer when handling complicated, but relatively unimportant purchase decisions. Bulk up on the requisite knowledge. Then let the your decisions flow.

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