The Decision Strategist

Our unconscious associations between different groups have a big effect on our decisions. I just took some disturbing tests designed to tease out the relationship between men and family and women and career, or Eurpean American and bad and African American and good. The results are both insightful and disturbing, and they have big implications for decision making.

Testing Your Associations

There is a test called the Implicit Association Test that is startlingly revealing. It tests how much your unconscious mind associates one category, say men, with another, say career. Turns out almost all of us are a lot faster at grouping things into a men and careers category and a woman and family category than we are at grouping things into a men and family and a woman and career category.

The disturbing thing is that these associations play into our decision, but are factors that we are unaware of. The woman interviewing for a job is just as qualified as the man, but the employer feels that she is too demure.

Or it may be more subtle, showing up in slightly more closed body language, smaller smiles, less talking.

If you are up to facing your own associations, there are a number of tests on the Project Implicit website. They may reveal some unpleasant things though; the test suggests that I have a slight automatic preference for white people compared to black people, a result that is disturbing to say the least.

Automatic Assocations are Everywhere

These associations don’t just affect how we act in social situations, they affect important business decisions as well. As a manager or owner you may be overlooking better workers because of a ’slight automatic preference’ for men and European Americans. Or perhaps you choose a vendor who is worse because of a ’slight automatic preference’ for tall people (which a majority of us also have).

The same effects are present for people: when selecting a planner, choosing a babysitter, buying a car, choosing where to live, etc. etc. How many suboptimal decisions do we make based on faulty automatic associations?

Automatic associations don’t cause us to make immediately detrimental decisions, which is perhaps part of why they are so insidious. Over time however, these subtle effects can really stack up against you.

Countering Invalid Automatic Associations

How can we possibly combat an unconscious and in some cases extremely beneficial decision making trait? Research suggests that these associations are learned from our environment in an astonishing number of ways, so maybe we can change our environment to reprogram our faulty automatic associations to be more in line with reality.

1. Pay attention to stereotypes. It’s a tired old refrain, but the stereotypes in media reinforce the automatic associations that we are looking to correct. Just noticing when women play a family role and men play a career role, or that cop show focuses on African Americans, can go a long way in neutralizing it.
2. Expand your range of experience. Spend a day in a neighborhood you don’t usually visit. Go to a different park. Go to a meetings for groups of people you disagree with. Of course, this only works if you have a receptive point of view. If you go to a meeting hating everyone there, you won’t get much out of it.
3. Try new things. I don’t mean eat new food, although that might be helpful too, I mean try new solutions to problems, new ways of arguing with your significant other, new ways of managing your time or your workers. Too often we get stuck in a mode that just works and don’t try out new things. Steve Pavlina (whose essays I can never find when I need them) has a great essay on this.

What’s amazing about these three things is that they’re incredibly hard to do. It’s so much easier, and maybe more enjoyable, to laugh at the sitcom instead of thinking about stereotypes. It’s so much easier to go from home to work to shopping and never visit the more interesting parts of the community you are part of. And it’s much much easier to fight with your significant other the same old way that you’ve been fighting for the past five years.

We are habitual creatures, and change is hard. But the rewards are sweet.

-zot, waxing a little philosophical on this Monday morning.

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For this week’s Sunday morning strategy discussion I wanted to talk about the thorny subject of 9-11 conspiracy theories. Last night the history channel had a segment on 9-11 conspiracies, where it basically compared the claims of the 9-11 truth movement to testimony from witnesses. I haven’t seen loose change or any other information regarding these theories, but I do know a lot of people that have seen it and believe it. The history channel said something like 36% of Americans think that the current administration may have had something to due with 9-11. The 9-11 conspiracy theory is no longer fringe.

The segment was a brilliant and subtle, not for convincingly debunking the conspiracy theories, but for the presentation of information so that it appears objective while really promoting the debunker’s perspective. Their main strategy was to present conspiracy theories as young, unprofessional, generalists while the debunkers looked professional and presented more fact-based information.

Information is a key in any conflict or decision, but it’s the center of any effort to convince the populous of your point of view. Both sides have taken advantage of releasing information early and often.

The Situation

Lets set up the situation from either side. You can take the role of a government official in charge of confusing and dispersing the movement, or you can take the role of a conspiracy theorist fighting to get your message out. The 9-11 situation provides plenty of information for use in determining a strategy. Mine is below.

My Strategy

I’ll take the role of each side here just for fun.

Government

As the government trying to convince people that conspiracy theorists are wrong, you’re kind of in a sticky situation. People who already believe in the conspiracy are not going to believe anything you say, regardless of how true it is. There are two possible angles of attack that I see:

• Movement Leaders. Movements typically rely on a few passionate leaders who are responsible for motivating people and for disseminating information.
• New Members. If the number of new converts to a movement can be stemmed or stopped, the movement itself begins to shrink and lose influence.

My strategy to counter the movement would focus on these two aspects. Forceful removal of leaders can backfire severely, so I would encourage them to leave of their own free will. Perhaps co-opt some of them by offering participation in official processes, or examine their lives for individual weaknesses.

The number of new recruits is already limited by the stigma that surrounds conspiracy theorists. They are typically portrayed as fringe members of society at best. This marginalization could be intensified with funding and encouragement through studies and media.

The other strategy I would pursue, assuming I had nothing to hide, would be to release as much information as possible for independent verification. While there would always be accusations of modified documents, it would sharply reduce conspiracy theory believers.

Movement

Movement leaders benefit from the inherent confusion of the 9-11 attacks and a public that is highly dissatisfied with the government. The problem they face is that the public views any unusual and outrageous claims as inherently presented by fringe members of society. Disagreeing with the standard accepted view gets you labeled as fringe almost by definition.

The other issue at hand is that I’m not clear what the goals of the movement are. If the object is just to ‘get the truth out there,’ then the strategy is different from what it would be if the goal is to have members of the conspiracy indicted.

Regardless, there are at least two things that are essential to the 9-11 truth movement’s efforts:

• Credibility. Establishing credibility is paramount. Without it it will be impossible to gain the public moment needed to create any kind of change or spread information effectively.
• Information. Verifiable information that supports the movements view and that is indisputable would go a long way in accomplishing goals. Unfortunately this information is either non-existent (if the theories are wrong) or probably very closely guarded and/or destroyed (if the theories are right).

As a movement leader then, I would focus on revising my presentation of data to be as professional as possible. This includes how the movement dresses, actions it takes, press releases that are made, studies and videos that are released, etc…

I would also work on building inroads to highly respected institutions. Even if they disagreed or were unwilling to support the movements efforts, any debates or exchanges of information, especially if public, would help to popularize conspiracy concerns. Next steps would depend on what your long term goals were.

As before, leave me comments with your strategies, or critiques and suggestions of what I have presented here. I’ll post the revised strategies next Sunday.

-zot

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This blog exists because I think that social networking had a huge potential to completely change decision making as we know it. Making decisions based on the input of your network is a relatively unexplored but very interesting possibility.

I also discuss startups, game theory, economics, and other topics as the whim strikes me.

The ability to set up decision making frameworks and then garner input from multiple parties has a lot of potential. While separately we are subject to certain fallacies and decision making errors, together we might spot pitfalls that otherwise we wouldn’t see.

While there are a few sites, such as MindTools (affiliate link), dedicated to decision making techniques and classes, there has not been a lot of work to extend these tools to be used as a group in business and everyday decisions.

Imagine needing to choose what car to buy or where to move, and being able to get immediate feedback from others about whether New York is better than Seattle and how. Only instead of a haphazard discussion, it happens within a framework designed to minimize errors in human judgment.

My goal is to get us started on that path, to develop a better community understanding of how our decision making errors affect us and what we can do about them. To create new tools and extend current ones for dealing with decisions in a real life setting.

Ultimately, I want you to improve your decision making and to help me improve mine.

I’m also working to shift my career to be based more on ‘creative implementation of ideas’ instead of purely research and statistically oriented. This includes a fair bit of programming and web site development. My current project along this vein is decyder.

-zot

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This post has been rolling around in my head for a week while I tried to think of a good example for the if-then fallacy, and now Dr Housing Bubble had provided a perfect one for me.

It seems that we have a particular weakness to logical fallacies presented as if-then statements. Here’s the example I’m talking about, read it fast:

Since the market is going down, buyers now have the leverage in negotiations (True). Since there is more inventory, you have more choice (True). Therefore, you should buy a house.

It’s funny because I actually agree with the whole thing. But a second later I’m saying to myself “wait a minute…”

The trick is fairly simple: get the person to agree with your if statement. The housing market IS going down. Buyers DO have leverage. Then just make the particular then statement you’d like. “Now is a good time to buy”. It’s the if-then fallacy in action.

Most people will accept the then statement without question, since the if statement is true, then the then statement must follow. The problem is that we don’t check to make sure that the if-then relationship is correct.

Just a short example of how our subconscious decision making process can trip us up. Anyone have any stories of how they’ve fallen prey to this behavior?

-zot

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