Decision Making

As a person who likes to research it’s always worried me how rapidly some people make decisions.  At the same time I have also found that my gut feel and instinct is very accurate and so that has given me some comfort.  There are a couple of books that address this topic and Thinking faster discusses both, as well as adding its own perspective.

What I did not understand until last night was that I had established in my own mind the amount of information I needed to begin making a decision.  I went with some friends to see Malcolm Gladwell, who wrote The Tipping Point and Blink.  In Blink, his latest book, Gladwell evaluates how people make quick decisions based on less than complete evidence, and the risks and opportunities that present themselves in making decisions like that.  What I took away from his talk were two things:  first, people do make good decisions with over a short period of time with little information if they have a lot of experience in the topic, and two, most of us have biases that color our decision making that we may not even be aware of.