Information deluge and poor decision making

Everyone is equal, but some are more equal than others.



Tom

 

If you believe the nice person at the ARC can rival the Einstein in cognitive functionality, it is you who is "tripping".

 

If you read the OP and the follow-up, the point is not the obvious one that if you overload people they get overloaded. The point is the processes that occur in the brain as a result of overload. Not merely that when there's too much information we can't keep track of it all and so make mistakes; but rather that in response to information overload certain processes in the brain shut down and stop functioning.

Understanding this could potentially enable a person to deal with the overload, perhaps by backing away before it reaches the critical point, and looking for other ways to approach the problem.

 

I'm not really convinced there is a deep surprise here. What kind of results were to be expected? That being swamped with decisions lead to better decisions, or that being swamped with decisions is easier to handle than fewer decisions?

Yes, there will be measurable effects in the brains, but the real surprise would be no correlation. That being said, I'm not belittling research in this area. Your last statement is a solid statement.....and as such this is the type of study where seeing how different "critical point" detections could be revealed would have made it vastly better.