Brainwork. David A. Sousa
information about items available for online purchase.15 As potential buyers scrolled through the site that had the most product information, they felt overwhelmed and their thoughts drifted away from their purchasing task, resulting in disinterest. More importantly, they made few or no purchases.
Making a Poor Decision
No matter how experienced you are, too much information can derail your decision-making process. This is not a new discovery. As far back as the late 1980s, Paul Andreassen at MIT conducted an experiment with a group of business students who were to buy and sell stocks in an imaginary portfolio.16 Each student selected a portfolio of stocks. Andreassen then divided the students into two groups. The first group had access to all the financial information they desired. They read financial newspapers, watched financial broadcasts on television, and were able to contact stock market experts for their opinions. The second group, however, could see only the changes in their stock prices, with no information as to why the prices rose or fell. They had to make trading decisions based on this very limited amount of information.
Would you, like Andreassen, have expected the first group with all that information to earn more than the data-limited second group? Surprisingly, that is not how it turned out. The group with less information earned more than twice as much as the info-rich group. It seems the first group was distracted by too much information. The more data they got, the more difficulty they had separating good advice from bad. They made many trades based on rumors and tips—a guaranteed way to lose money in the stock market.
Imagine conducting a similar study today. With so much financial information available in seconds, one wonders what types of decisions individual investors make. One answer is to look at day traders, those people who make dozens of stock trades a day in the hopes of eking out a little profit on each. David Segal of the New York Times cites studies showing that about 80 percent of active individual traders lose money, and only about 1 percent are predictably profitable.17
Regretting the Decision
Recall the participants in Dijksterhuis’ and Messner’s studies: those who made a decision soon after reviewing all the data grew to regret their choice, whereas those with limited information who delayed their decision had no regrets.18 One of Iyengar’s studies supports these results.19 The study involved students who were doing job searches. She and her colleagues looked at the amount of information the students collected about an industry (such as prominent companies, the corporate culture, the cities where the companies were located, and average pay and benefits) and their degree of satisfaction with their choices. The researchers discovered that those students who collected a lot of information were less satisfied with their choices than students who collected less information. Apparently, the students who amassed lots of information knew so much about various job possibilities that they could see themselves doing better later in a job that they did not take. And this same regret occurred even when the individual made an objectively better choice. Professor Schwartz at Swarthmore says that when faced with so many choices, decision makers “may do better, but feel worse.” To him, “too many choices become paralyzing rather than liberating.”20
Once again, we have research results that seem counterintuitive. Having collected all that information, shouldn’t the students have been pleased with the final choices they made? Schwartz says that depends on a person’s goal when making a decision. Based on his research, he suggests that some individuals are satisicers, those who look at the options and settle for good enough. Satisficers have standards, and when they find the option that meets those standards, they choose it. They don’t fret over their choice or whether there might be something better. They move on. Then there are the maximizers, those who want to get the best choice whenever they make a decision. How does one get the best? By searching through all the possibilities—an impossible task even when deciding on jam in a supermarket. At some point, maximizers have to make a decision. Unfortunately, that decision often leads to regret. Regret? How can that be? Surely, with all that information, one should feel secure in the final decision. It doesn’t work that way. Maximizers start wondering, “What if I waited a little longer, or collected more data, or studied the options a little harder, might I have made a better choice?” If the choice they made is disappointing, they cannot escape the realization that the poor choice was their fault because, after all, they had plenty of other options available. Over time, the constant feeling of regret and self-blame begins to wear on maximizers—in some cases, to the point of clinical depression. They eventually become regret-aversive and start to avoid making decisions at all.
How to Deal With Information Overload
Before deciding how to handle information overload, you need to be certain that the problem is really too much information as opposed to too much work. Some people misinterpret work overload as information overload. Do your decision makers have too many duties or too many goals to accomplish, or do they waste too much time in excessive travel? If this is the case, then you need to adjust the responsibilities to be more realistic so that you and your colleagues can achieve your goals. If not, then we can look at some strategies that may help you tackle the perils of too much information and too many choices, and ultimately make good decisions. Note that the strategies focus on you taking control of the information environment rather than feeling controlled by it.
Stick to the Relevant
You live in a world in which information systems are constantly throwing more and more facts, figures, and opinions at you. What you really need are systems that filter out unimportant or irrelevant information. The key ingredient in the attention game is relevancy. The brain is always trying to discern patterns and make meaning out of new information. Relevancy makes our attention span stretch a bit further, improving our information-processing capacity and cerebral efficiency so it takes less time and attention resources to acquire the information we really need.
Disregard the Unimportant
Some corporate emails have the same value as junk mail. Devise a method for recognizing them (for example, by name of sender or topic) and send them immediately to the spam folder.
Apportion Your Time Based on Importance
Not every item of information is equally important. Give the most time to those that really matter and skim or ignore the rest.
Prescreen the Information
Consider having all information pass through an assistant who knows your preferences and sends you only the material you need to see. Occasionally look at a sampling of screened-out material to ensure the assistant is following your directions and to avoid becoming isolated.
Divide the Burden
See if there is someone else in the organization who should be getting some of the information instead of you. Divide the overload, and meet with colleagues, when necessary, to share information and work toward a decision.
Practice Chunking
When faced with too much information, the brain attempts to combine items that have similar characteristics—a process known as chunking. Chunking can increase the number of items that working memory can hold. Get that pencil and paper again. Stare at the letters below for seven seconds. Then look away and write them down in the correct sequence and groupings. Ready? Go.
TVI RSCN NF BIU SA
Check your results. Did you get all the letters in the correct sequence and groupings? Probably not. Most people do not score 100 percent on this after looking at the letters for such a short period. Let’s try it again with the same rules. Stare for seven seconds and write down the letters below in the same sequence and groupings. Ready? Go.
TV IRS CNN FBI USA
How did you do this time? Probably much better. If you compare the two examples, you will note they are the same letters in the same sequence. What happened here? In the first example, the groupings made little or no sense. Thus, the brain treated each of the fourteen letters and each of the four spaces (because grouping is important) as a separate item, resulting