Brainwork. David A. Sousa
weeks later, the participants completed surveys on their perceived stress and overall health. For example, they were asked how often they had health problems in the previous three months and to identify specific symptoms they experienced during that time period, such as headaches, feelings of depression, acid indigestion, and insomnia. Participants who said they had high levels of cyber-based overload in the initial surveys reported in the follow-up surveys that they had higher levels of stress and more frequent and severe health problems. Curiously, the place-based information overload had no discernable impact on stress, but it did have a negative effect on health.
This study had some other interesting findings that executives may wish to ponder. First, individuals who said they were high sensation seekers reported lower levels of stress from cyber-based overload compared to those who said they were low sensation seekers. Second, participants experiencing high levels of cyber-based information overload said they had little time for contemplative and reflective activities. When working memory is crammed with information, there is little room left for self-reflection and for contemplating the consequences of pending decisions.
A survey of business managers in Britain reported by David Bawden of the Department of Information Science at the City University London had some surprising revelations.10 Two-thirds of these managers believed information overload had caused a loss of job satisfaction and damaged their personal relationships. About one-third believed it had damaged their health, and nearly half believed important decisions were delayed and adversely affected because of having too much information.
Bawden and his colleague Lyn Robinson later went on to describe several forms of strange behaviors that arise when people are faced with overwhelming amounts of information.11 Particularly amusing is the term infobesity, a sort of feasting excessively on information as though it were fast food. Treatments for this condition include information avoidance, which is essentially ignoring relevant and useful information because there is too much of it, and information withdrawal, which is keeping the number of information sources to a minimum.
Then there is satisficing, a coping strategy whereby one takes in just enough information to meet a specific need and ignores the rest. This could be considered a practical approach for one who is not aware of the full range of choices. Simply glean the information that is good enough and do not worry if the best information is unavailable. Many new-car buyers resort to satisficing rather than dealing with the dizzying amount of data on car models. They pick two or three possibilities based on their experience or a friend’s recommendation, and then they seek out some basic information about each: Is the gas mileage reasonable? How well does it survive crash tests? How does it look and feel behind the wheel? And that’s it!
Psychologist Barry Schwartz of Swarthmore College argues that the bewildering variety of choices available in modern life (think not only car models, but the different kinds of cereals, jams, and blue jeans) causes anxiety and has paralyzing effects on our ability to make choices.12 To him, satisficing is a valid approach because it lowers stress and increases happiness. Although satisficing may be useful when making choices in the supermarket or department store, it may not be an appropriate method for making executive decisions in a business. There are risks to this seemingly sensible option. More effective choices may be overlooked, and the process may be reduced to information avoidance, a potential calamity in the marketing world. To prevent this, there should be a clear rationale to support any decisions made through satisficing.
The Impact of Information Overload on Decision Making
Scientific research on how we make decisions continually undermines the old notion that the more information we have about a situation, the better. As more information bombards us more often and more incessantly, we are discovering that it has detrimental effects on rational processing, problem solving, and decision making. Let’s take a look at what can happen.
Making No Decision
Not long ago, I visited a neighbor who had just bought a fifty-inch flat-screen television with an astounding array of features. The clarity and resolution of the picture were very impressive, and the multiple speakers enveloped me in bone-rattling sound. I was enthralled with this technology because my current television is a twelve-year-old, twenty-seven-inch set with a picture tube (remember those?) and two small front-facing speakers. It occurred to me that a set this old was probably going to fail soon—the perfect excuse to visit a local branch of a national electronics store. After fifteen minutes of roaming around the cavernous place, I found the multiple aisles of television sets. Counting brand names, models, picture sizes, and other options, there were more than 120 different choices. The variety was beyond my expectations, and the data paralyzed my thought processes. Fortunately, a rescue was imminent.
The television sales assistant approached and offered his help. He asked what kind of television set I currently owned and was surprised that it had the old-fashioned picture tube. Before I could say, “I’m just looking,” he proceeded to describe all the models and options. He made his preferences clear, explaining the technical data that proved how sensible his choices were for me. “Which one would you like to take home?” he asked. Overwhelmed by the choices, I thanked him and walked hurriedly out of the store. I pray that my old set will provide a few more years of service before I have to face that scene again.
Numerous studies show that when people are dealing with too much information and have too many choices, they are likely to make no decision at all. For example, Sheena Iyengar, a professor of business at Columbia University, and her colleagues have done a number of “too many choices” studies.13 One of these looked at the participation rate of employees in voluntary 401(k) plans offered by the Vanguard investment group. The investment executives were puzzled as to why there was such low participation, given the wide variety of plans that employees could choose from.
The researchers looked at the records of about 800,000 employees in more than 600 different companies. They discovered that as the number of plan options increased, participation in the plans decreased. When there were just two options, 75 percent of eligible employees participated, but when the number of options rose to fifty-nine, participation dropped to 61 percent. The many choices were so overwhelming that 14 percent of participants dropped out, and nearly 40 percent of employees opted not to enroll in any plan. They just could not make a decision. This result was bewildering because the nonparticipating employees not only were sidestepping the opportunity to establish a retirement nest egg, but were also passing up a gift from their employers, many of whom matched employee retirement contributions up to a set amount. At the same time, the employers who thought they were improving the financial well-being of their workers by offering more retirement plans were actually causing enrollment in these plans to drop. A positive goal but a negative outcome.
Even a seemingly simple decision, like buying a jar of jam, can be bewildering if the amount of information is excessive. In a California supermarket, Iyengar and colleague Mark Lepper set up a jam-tasting booth that switched each day between offering an assortment of six jams or twenty-four jams.14 These were just a small sampling of the brain-numbing 348 varieties available in the jam aisle of the store. Shoppers who stopped by the booth were able to sample each jam and receive a coupon that would take one dollar off every jar of jam they bought.
Not surprisingly, only 40 percent of incoming shoppers stopped at the booth when the researchers displayed just six jams, but that jumped to 60 percent when they displayed twenty-four jams. Obviously, the larger assortment appealed more to shoppers than the smaller one. However, when the time came to select a jam from the jam aisle, the shoppers who had seen only six jams had a much easier time deciding which jam to purchase. Listening in on the shoppers’ conversations in the jam aisle, the researchers discovered that the small assortment helped the shoppers to narrow down their choices, whereas the large assortment left shoppers confused and uncertain about their own preferences. In the end, the shoppers who stopped by the smaller assortment bought six times as much jam as those who stopped by the larger display, even though the latter was more popular. Too many varieties led many to a decision not to buy.
In another study, marketing experts Maria Sicilia and Salvador Ruiz of the University of Murcia in Spain created three versions of a website,