Visual Errors in the Decision Making Process
August 28th, 2007I’ve talked about several different ways in which our brains take shortcuts that lead to bad decision making. But there are factors that affect our decisions in more subtle ways. For instance, Our Brain Fills Visual Gaps in what we see. It tends to pick out general outlines and a few key items in our field of vision, and fill in the textures and colors based on assumptions.
We place a lot of emphasis on memory, especially in lawsuits, but how smart is it to rely on eye witness accounts when our memories and visual perceptions are so faulty?
Memory is associative, and so memory techniques are based on creating strong visualizations. The technique of visualizing things you want to remember in rooms inside your house is amazingly effective because it involves a variety of senses. Regular memorization works by repetition, which is a poor utilization of the strengths of how our memory works.
Chess masters play chess in a similar way, recognizing entire patterns of pieces rather than a few pieces.
What if there was a similar process for decision making? We typically make decisions guided by our emotional response to each option. This process works extremely well for most decisions, and takes a minimum amount of processing. But in some situations it fails spectacularly.
Could there be a decision making technique similar to the memorization technique, that makes use of our associative tendencies? Or is that exactly what we do now? What would such a process look like?
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