ruminating

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it would be presumptuous to start thinking about having to make a choice about job offers i don't have yet... just as it would be presumptuous to start making 5- and 10-year career plans before finishing law school (or even 2nd year)... the day after yet another job interview, i can't help but wish i could turn off the obsessive-compulsive personality disorder...

When decisions involve a lot of complex factors, thinking deeply about them can produce worse outcomes than decisions made simply after "sleeping on it," according to research published last week in Science.

Volunteers asked to make judgments about the quality of different cars based on four criteria were more likely to choose the best car if they did think deeply about it, compared with those who did not put much effort into thinking about the decision. But volunteers provided with 12 criteria about the cars fared worse when they thought deeply about their decision, compared with volunteers who were given the same information, were deliberately distracted by other things, and then were asked to make a judgment call.

Ap Dijksterhuis and colleagues at the University of Amsterdam said over-thinking complex decisions seems to produce dissatisfaction with the final answer, compared with simple gut responses. They hypothesized that the reason people do not make good decisions by thinking deeply in complex situations is because multiple evaluations of an issue can produce inconsistent conclusions. Additionally, people really can take into account only a limited number of things and, when presented with too much information, they focus on the wrong things.

"We tend to inflate the importance of some attributes at the expense of others, leading to worse choices," the scientists wrote. They later added that it "should benefit the individual to think consciously about simple matters and to delegate thinking about more complex matters to the unconscious."

-- Shankar Vedantam, Washington Post (2006/02/20)

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