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INFORMATION OVERLOAD AND
DECISION MAKING
By
Dean Berry, Ed. D
www.commoncorecurriculum.info
In this unit of study students will read four academic articles
that deal with a complex issue. Challenging words will be
highlighted in gold so they can be carefully reviewed for
meaning and practiced using the web site www.quizlet.com.
Students may search for these words on quizlet by using the
quizlet search box and typing in Information Overload 1 for the
first article and Information Overload 2 for the second article
and so on. Quizlet will enable students to learn these difficult
words using several different activities and quizzes.
INFORMATION OVERLOAD AND DECISION MAKING:
READ, DISCUSS, AND WRITE
Prior to reading, students will study the key words using www.quizlet.com .
During the reading, students will apply close reading skills so they can unpack
complex text and decipher the author’s intended meaning. Articles will be
carefully read and discussed with a focus on author’s claims and supporting
evidence. In most cases, sections will be reread several times to help extract
precise details and evaluate conclusions.
After reading an entire article, students will write a brief summary of the claims
that are supported by clear evidence and the conclusions that can be
drawn. The process of reading, discussing, and writing will be repeated for all
four articles that are provided for this unit of study. The theme of this unit is
information overload. The final activity of this unit will be to write a two
or three page paper comparing and contrasting the main ideas of the four
articles. The claims presented in each article will be reviewed and evaluated as
students reach their own conclusions about the topic of information
QUIZLET PRACTICE WORDS FOR
ARTICLE NUMBER ONE
Study the following vocabulary words before
reading the following complex text about
information overload. Use www.quizlet.com and
learn these words before reading the article. Use
the quizlet search box and type in Information
Overload 1 in order to study the words that will be
used in this article.
IDENTIFYING CLAIMS AND EVIDENCE
As you read he following article, identify the
claims that the author is making about
information overload and the impact on
decision making. Be prepared to discuss each
claim and whether or not it is supported by
adequate evidence. Use close reading skills as
you reread important sections.
DEATH BY INFORMATION OVERLOAD
PAUL HEMP
FROM THE SEPTEMBER 2009 ISSUE
THE HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW
Can everyone just stop whining about information overload?
I mean, in the knowledge economy, information is our most
valuable commodity.
And these days it’s available in almost infinite
abundance, delivered automatically to our
electronic devices or accessible with a few mouse
clicks. So buck up, already!
Wait a second: Can I just stop whining about
information overload?
THE FLOOD OF INFORMATION THAT SWAMPS ME DAILY SEEMS TO
PRODUCE MORE PAIN THAN GAIN. AND IT’S NOT JUST THE
INCOMING TIDAL WAVE OF E-MAIL MESSAGES AND RSS FEEDS
THAT CAUSES ME GRIEF. IT’S ALSO THE VAST OCEAN OF
INFORMATION I FEEL COMPELLED TO GO OUT AND EXPLORE IN
ORDER TO KEEP UP IN MY JOB.
Current research suggests that the surging volume
of available information—and its interruption of
people’s work—can adversely affect not only
personal well-being but also decision making,
innovation, and productivity. In one study, for
example, people took an average of nearly 25
minutes to return to a work task after an e-mail
interruption. That’s bad news for both individuals
and their organizations.
There’s hope, though. Innovative tools and
techniques promise relief for those of us
struggling with information inundation. Some are
technological solutions—software that
automatically sorts and prioritizes incoming e-
mail, for instance—designed to regulate or divert
the deluge. Others prevent people from drowning
by getting them to change the way they behave
and think. Who knows: Maybe someday even I will
enjoy swimming in the powerful currents of
information that now threaten to pull me under.
The Problem for Individuals
Information overload, of course, dates back to Gutenberg. The
invention of movable type led to a proliferation of printed matter
that quickly exceeded what a single human mind could absorb in a
lifetime. Later technologies—from carbon paper to the
photocopier—made replicating existing information even easier. And
once information was digitized, documents could be copied in
limitless numbers at virtually no cost.
Digitizing content also removed barriers to another activity first made
possible by the printing press: publishing new information. No longer
restricted by centuries-old production and distribution costs, anyone
can be a publisher today. (The internet, with its far-reaching and free
distribution channels, wasn’t the only enabler. Consider how the word
processor eliminated the need for a steno-pad–equipped secretary,
with ready access to typewriter and White-Out, who could help an
executive bring a memo into the world.) In fact, a lot of new
information—personalized purchase recommendations from Amazon,
for instance—is “published” and distributed without any active human
input.
With the information floodgates open, content
rushes at us in countless formats: text messages
and twitter tweets on our cell phones, facebook
friend alerts and voice mail on our BlackBerrys,
instant messages and direct-marketing sales
pitches (no longer limited by the cost of postage) on
our desktop computers, not to mention the ultimate
killer app: e-mail. (I, for one, have nearly expired
during futile efforts to keep up with it).
Meanwhile, we’re drawn toward information that in
the past didn’t exist or that we didn’t have access
to but, now that it’s available, we dare not ignore:
online research reports and industry data, blogs
written by colleagues or by executives at rival
companies, wikis and discussion forums on topics
we’re following, the corporate intranet, the latest
banal musings of friends in our social networks.
So it’s a lot of stuff—but what precisely is the problem?
Well, the chorus of whining (punctuated by my own
discordant moans) apparently has some validity.
Researchers say that the stress of not being able to
process information as fast as it arrives—combined with the
personal and social expectation that, say, you will answer
every e-mail message—can deplete and demoralize you.
WHAT IS THE AUTHOR’S CLAIM
ON THE PREVIOUS FRAME?
Go back one frame and reread the text. Can
you find the claim?
What does the author use as evidence?
Edward Hallowell, a psychiatrist and expert on attention-
deficit disorders, argues that the modern workplace
induces what he calls “attention deficit trait,” with
characteristics similar to those of the genetically based
disorder. Author Linda Stone, who coined the term
“continuous partial attention” to describe the mental
state of today’s knowledge workers, says she’s now
noticing—get this—“e-mail apnea”: the unconscious
suspension of regular and steady breathing when people
tackle their e-mail.
There are even claims that the relentless cascade of
information lowers people’s intelligence. A few years ago,
a study commissioned by Hewlett-Packard reported that
the IQ scores of knowledge workers distracted by e-mail
and phone calls fell from their normal level by an average
of 10 points—twice the decline recorded for those
smoking marijuana, several commentators wryly noted.
Of course, not everyone feels overwhelmed by the torrent
of information. Some are stimulated by it. But that raises
the specter of…[cue scary music]…information addiction.
According to a 2008 AOL survey of 4,000 e-mail users in
the United States, 46% were “hooked” on e-mail. Nearly
60% of everyone surveyed checked e-mail in the bathroom,
15% checked it in church, and 11% had hidden the fact
that they were checking it from a spouse or other family
member.
The tendency of always-available information to blur the boundaries
between work and home can affect our personal lives in unexpected
ways. Consider the recently reported phenomenon of…[really scary
music]…BlackBerry orphans: children who desperately fight to regain
their parents’ attention from the devices—in at least one reported
case, by flushing a BlackBerry down the toilet.
WHAT IS THE AUTHOR’S CLAIM ON
THE PREVIOUS TWO FRAMES?
Go back two frames and reread the text on the
last two. Can you find the claim?
What does the author use as evidence?
Discuss possible answers with the class and
then write your own version of the claim and
supporting evidence.
The Problem for Companies
Most organizations unknowingly pay a high price as
individuals struggle to manage the information glut. For
one thing, productive time is lost as employees deal with
information of limited value. In the case of e-mail,
effective spam filters have reduced this problem. Still, a
survey of 2,300 Intel employees revealed that people
judge nearly one-third of the messages they receive to
be unnecessary. Given that those same employees spend
about two hours a day processing e-mail (employees
surveyed received an average of 350 messages a week,
executives up to 300 a day), a serious amount of time is
clearly being wasted.
WHAT IS THE AUTHOR’S CLAIM
ON THE PREVIOUS FRAME?
Go back one frame and reread the text. Can you
find the claim?
What does the author use as evidence?
Write the claim and the evidence and share with
your class.
“Many companies are still in denial about the
problem,” says Nathan Zeldes, a former Intel senior
engineer, who oversaw the study. “And though
people suffer, they don’t fight back, because
communication is supposed to be good for you.”
Zeldes is now the president of the Information
Overload Research Group, a consortium of
academics and executives.
Another set of problems involves the constant interruptions we face,
whatever the value of the content. When you respond to an e-mail alert
that pops up on your screen or to the vibration of your cell phone when
you’re “poked” by a Facebook friend, you do more than spend time
reading the message. You also have to recover from the interruption and
refocus your attention. A study by Microsoft researchers tracking the e-
mail habits of coworkers found that once their work had been
interrupted by an e-mail notification, people took, on average, 24
minutes to return to the suspended task.
WHAT IS THE AUTHOR’S CLAIM ON
THE PREVIOUS FRAME?
Go back one frame and reread the text. Can
you find the claim?
What does the author use as evidence?
The scenario the researchers described was unsettlingly
familiar. Dealing with the message that had prompted the
alert represented only a portion of the time off task.
People often used the interruption as an opportunity to
read other unopened e-mail messages—or to engage in
such unrelated activities as text-messaging a friend or
surfing the web. Surprisingly, more than half the time was
spent after people were ready to return to their work:
cycling through open applications on their computers to
determine what they’d been doing when interrupted;
getting distracted by some other work in progress as they
moved from one window to another; and reestablishing
their state of mind once they finally arrived at the
application they’d abandoned nearly a half hour earlier.
CAN YOU SUMMARIZE THE MAIN IDEA
PRESENTED ON THE PRIOR FRAME?
Return to the last frame viewed and
write a 2-3 sentence summary of the
main point the author is making.
Distractions created by incoming e-mail and other
types of information also have more-subtle
consequences. Research by Teresa M. Amabile of
Harvard Business School has identified reduced
creative activity on days when work is fragmented
by interruptions. And we know from other research
that even young workers, who have lots of
experience frequently switching from one device or
application to another, need uninterrupted periods
during which to successfully tackle particularly
demanding tasks.
Another eerily familiar, if rarely articulated, consequence
of information overload is receiving attention from
researchers: the delay in decision making when you don’t
know whether or when someone will answer an e-mail
message. If you don’t hear back in a timely fashion, you’re
left wondering: Was your message willfully ignored by the
recipient because it ticked him off? Automatically diverted
to his junk mail folder? Left for later response? Or is it
simply languishing unnoticed because he’s swamped by e-
mail? (Some of these questions would be answered if more
e-mail recipients—though don’t count me among them—
would click on those annoying confirmation-of-receipt
requests that some senders activate.)
The ambiguity created by this online silence can
sometimes be worse than a delayed response,
according to Northwestern University researcher Yoram
Kalman. Our minds go through a series of
semiconscious calculations based on past experience:
How long does this person usually take to answer e-
mail? Should I bother her with a follow-up? Should I
escalate my efforts by leaving a voice mail message,
and at which number? Should I walk over to Building D
to see whether she’s at her desk? Shout out the window
at the top of my lungs? Meanwhile, you may have to put
a project on hold for an indefinite period while you await
a response that the recipient could provide in no more
than a minute or two.
What does all this add up to? It’s not easy to quantify
the costs of these and other consequences of
information overload. But one calculation by Nathan
Zeldes and two other researchers put Intel’s annual
cost of reduced efficiency, in the form of time lost to
handling unnecessary e-mail and recovering from
information interruptions, at nearly $1 billion. He
says organizations ignore that kind of number at
their peril.
READ, REVIEW, AND RECORD
As you reread this article from the beginning,
review the most important claims and supporting
evidence and record careful notes. Your notes will
be used as you write a paper about information
overload and effective decision making. This paper
will be written after you complete your evaluation of
all four articles in this unit of study.
HTTP://WWW.NEWSWEEK.COM/SCIENCE
-MAKING-DECISIONS-68627
THE SCIENCE OF MAKING
DECISIONS
BY SHARON BEGLEY ON 2/27/11 AT 10:00 AM Newsweek
Imagine the most mind-numbing choice you’ve faced
lately, one in which the possibilities almost paralyzed
you: buying a car, choosing a health-care plan, figuring
out what to do with your 401(k). The anxiety you felt
might have been just the well-known consequence of
information overload, but Angelika Dimoka, director of
the Center for Neural Decision Making at Temple
University, suspects that a more complicated biological
phenomenon is at work.
To confirm it, she needed to find a problem that
overtaxes people’s decision-making abilities, so she
joined forces with economists and computer scientists
who study “combinatorial auctions,” bidding wars that
bear almost no resemblance to the eBay version.
Bidders consider a dizzying number of items that can
be bought either alone or bundled, such as airport
landing slots.
.
The challenge is to buy the combination you want at the
lowest price—a diabolical puzzle if you’re considering, say,
100 landing slots at LAX. As the number of items and
combinations explodes, so does the quantity of information
bidders must juggle: passenger load, weather, connecting
flights. Even experts become anxious and mentally
exhausted. In fact, the more information they try to absorb,
the fewer of the desired items they get and the more they
overpay or make critical errors.
This is where Dimoka comes in. She recruited volunteers to try their hand at
combinatorial auctions, and as they did she measured their brain activity with
fMRI. As the information load increased, she found, so did activity in the
dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, a region behind the forehead that is responsible for
decision making and control of emotions. But as the researchers gave the bidders
more and more information, activity in the dorsolateral PFC suddenly fell off, as if a
circuit breaker had popped. “The bidders reach cognitive and information
overload,” says Dimoka. They start making stupid mistakes and bad choices
because the brain region responsible for smart decision making has essentially left
the premises. For the same reason, their frustration and anxiety soar: the brain’s
emotion regions—previously held in check by the dorsolateral PFC—run as wild as
toddlers on a sugar high. The two effects build on one another. “With too much
information, ” says Dimoka, “people’s decisions make less and less sense.”
RETURN TO THE PRIOR FRAME AND
IDENTIFY THE CONCLUSION OF THE STUDY.
What was the conclusion that was drawn
about the impact of too much information on
bidders at an auction? Write your answer
down before sharing with the class.
So much for the ideal of making well-informed decisions.
For earlier generations, that means simply the due
diligence of looking things up in a reference book. Today,
with Twitter and Facebook and countless apps fed into our
smart phones, the flow of facts and opinion never stops.
That can be a good thing, as when information empowers
workers and consumers, not to mention whistle-blowers
and revolutionaries. You can find out a used car’s accident
history, a doctor’s malpractice record, a restaurant’s
health-inspection results. Yet research like Dimoka’s is
showing that a surfeit of information is changing the way
we think, not always for the better.
CLASS DISCUSSION
What are the good things about having
quick access to a vast amount of
information?
How do you use quick information sources
to improve your life and the lives of those
around you?
QUICK WRITE
Write a paragraph with a minimum of five
sentences describing how your life can be
improved by easy access to huge amounts of
information.
Maybe you consulted scores of travel websites to pick a vacation
spot—only to be so overwhelmed with information that you opted
for a staycation. Maybe you were this close to choosing a
college, when suddenly older friends swamped your inbox with all
the reasons to go somewhere else—which made you completely
forget why you’d chosen the other school. Maybe you had the
Date From Hell after being so inundated with information on
“matches” that you chose at random. If so, then you are a victim
of info-paralysis.
The problem has been creeping up on us for a long time. In
the 17th century Leibniz bemoaned the “horrible mass of
books which keeps on growing,” and in 1729 Alexander Pope
warned of “a deluge of authors cover[ing] the land,” as
James Gleick describes in his new book, The Information.
But the consequences were thought to be emotional and
psychological, chiefly anxiety about being unable to absorb
even a small fraction of what’s out there. Indeed, the Oxford
English Dictionary added “information fatigue” in 2009.
CLASS DISCUSSION
According to this article, what is info-paralysis?
What is information fatigue?
Are they the same thing?
If they are different, explain the differences?
But as information finds more ways to reach us, more often,
more insistently than ever before, another consequence is
becoming alarmingly clear: trying to drink from a firehose of
information has harmful cognitive effects. And nowhere are
those effects clearer, and more worrying, than in our ability to
make smart, creative, successful decisions.
WHAT IS THE AUTHOR’S CLAIM ON
THE PREVIOUS FRAME?
Go back one frame and reread the text. Can
you find the claim?
Identify and write the author’s claim.
The research should give pause to anyone addicted to
incoming texts and tweets. The booming science of
decision making has shown that more information can
lead to objectively poorer choices, and to choices that
people come to regret. It has shown that an unconscious
system guides many of our decisions, and that it can be
sidelined by too much information. And it has shown that
decisions requiring creativity benefit from letting the
problem incubate below the level of awareness—
something that becomes ever-more difficult when
information never stops arriving.
Decision science has only begun to incorporate research on
how the brain processes information, but the need for
answers is as urgent as the stakes are high. During the BP
oil-well blowout last year, Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, the
incident commander, estimates that he got 300 to 400
pages of emails, texts, reports, and other messages every
day.
•
It’s impossible to know whether less information, more calmly
evaluated, would have let officials figure out sooner how to cap
the well, but Allen tells NEWSWEEK’s Daniel Stone that the
torrent of data might have contributed to what he calls the
mistake of failing to close off air space above the gulf on day one.
(There were eight near midair collisions.)
A comparable barrage of information assailed
administration officials before the overthrow of the Egyptian
government, possibly producing at least one misstep: CIA
Director Leon Panetta told Congress that Hosni Mubarak
was about to announce he was stepping down—right before
the Egyptian president delivered a defiant, rambling speech
saying he wasn’t going anywhere. “You always think
afterwards about what you could have done better, but there
isn’t time in the moment to second-guess,” said White House
Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer. “You have to make
your decision and go execute.” As scientists probe how the
flow of information affects decision making, they’ve spotted
several patterns.
Among them:
TOTAL FAILURE TO DECIDE
Every bit of incoming information presents a choice:
whether to pay attention, whether to reply, whether to
factor it into an impending decision. But decision science
has shown that people faced with a plethora of choices are
apt to make no decision at all. The clearest example of this
comes from studies of financial decisions. In a 2004 study,
Sheena Iyengar of Columbia University and colleagues
found that the more information people confronted about
a 401(k) plan, the more participation fell: from 75 percent
to 70 percent as the number of choices rose from two to
11, and to 61 percent when there were 59 options.
People felt overwhelmed and opted out. Those who
participated chose lower-return options—worse
choices. Similarly, when people are given
information about 50 rather than 10 options in an
online store, they choose lower-quality options.
Although we say we prefer more information, in fact more can be
“debilitating,” argues Lyengar, whose 2010 book The Art of Choosing,
comes out in paperback in March. “When we make decisions, we
compare bundles of information. So a decision is harder if the amount
of information you have to juggle is greater.” In recent years, businesses
have offered more and more choices to cater to individual tastes. For
mustard or socks, this may not be a problem, but the proliferation of
choices can create paralysis when the stakes are high and the
information complex.
CLASS DISCUSSION
Imagine the following scenario. You have just won $200,000
and your only mode of transportation has been an old
skateboard or catching rides from friends and relatives.
Your first desire is to find a great new ride. Fortunately, you
have the bucks and the time to satisfy this need.
How many different brands and models will you have to
choose from?
Which models should be considered?
Being realistic, how many automobile dealers would you
probably visit before pulling the trigger on your new ride?
Would you buy the new car on your first day looking? How
long might you look at autos before snapping one up?
MANY DIMINISHING RETURNS
If we manage to make a decision despite info-deluge, it often comes
back to haunt us. The more information we try to assimilate, the more we
tend to regret the many forgone options. In a 2006 study, Iyengar and
colleagues analyzed job searches by college students. The more sources
and kinds of information (about a company, an industry, a city, pay,
benefits, corporate culture) they collected, the less satisfied they were
with their decision. They knew so much, consciously or unconsciously,
they could easily imagine why a job not taken would have been better. In
a world of limitless information, regret over the decisions we make
becomes more common. We chafe at the fact that identifying the best
feels impossible. “Even if you made an objectively better choice, you tend
to be less satisfied with it,” says Iyengar.
QUICK WRITE
Return to the last frame and use the
ideas to write a paragraph about the
possible affects of having too much
information and too many choices.
A key reason for information’s diminishing or even negative
returns is the limited capacity of the brain’s working
memory. It can hold roughly seven items (which is why
seven-digit phone numbers were a great idea). Anything
more must be processed into long-term memory. That takes
conscious effort, as when you study for an exam. When
more than seven units of information land in our brain’s
inbox, argues psychologist Joanne Cantor, author of the
2009 book Conquer Cyber Overload and an emerita
professor at the University of Wisconsin, the brain
struggles to figure out what to keep and what to disregard.
Ignoring the repetitious and the useless requires cognitive
resources and vigilance, a harder task when there is so
much information.
WHAT IS THE AUTHOR’S CLAIM ON
THE PREVIOUS FRAME?
Go back one frame and reread the text. What
is the claim made by Joanne Cantor?
What does the author use as evidence?
Write the claim and the supporting evidence.
It isn’t only the quantity of information that knocks the
brain for a loop; it’s the rate. The ceaseless influx trains us
to respond instantly, sacrificing accuracy and
thoughtfulness to the false god of immediacy. “We’re being
trained to prefer an immediate decision even if it’s bad to a
later decision that’s better,” says psychologist Clifford Nass
of Stanford University. “In business, we’re seeing a
preference for the quick over the right, in large part
because so many decisions have to be made. The notion
that the quick decision is better is becoming normative.”
RECENCY TRUMPS QUALITY
The brain is wired to notice change over stasis. An arriving email
that pops to the top of your BlackBerry qualifies as a change; so
does a new Facebook post. We are conditioned to give greater
weight in our decision-making machinery to what is latest, not
what is more important or more interesting. “There is a powerful
‘recency’ effect in decision making,” says behavioral economist
George Loewenstein of Carnegie Mellon University. “We pay a
lot of attention to the most recent information, discounting
what came earlier.” Getting 30 texts per hour up to the moment
when you make a decision means that most of them make all
the impression of a feather on a brick wall, whereas Nos. 29 and
30 assume much more importance, regardless of their validity.
QUICK WRITE
Return to the last frame and write a
summary of the main idea that is
presented in that section of the article.
“We’re fooled by immediacy and quantity and think it’s
quality,” says Eric Kessler, a management expert at Pace
University’s Lubin School of Business. “What starts driving
decisions is the urgent rather than the important.”
THE NEGLECTED UNCONSCIOUS
Creative decisions are more likely to bubble up from a brain that applies
unconscious thought to a problem, rather than going at it in a full-frontal,
analytical assault. So while we’re likely to think creative thoughts in the shower,
it’s much harder if we’re under a virtual deluge of data. “If you let things come at
you all the time, you can’t use additional information to make a creative leap or a
wise judgment,” says Cantor. “You need to pull back from the constant influx and
take a break.” That allows the brain to subconsciously integrate new information
with existing knowledge and thereby make novel connections and see hidden
patterns. In contrast, a constant focus on the new makes it harder for information
to percolate just below conscious awareness, where it can combine in ways that
spark smart decisions.
CLASS DISCUSSION
Use the former frame to help answer this
question.
What kind of argument can be made that a
constant flood of new information can
result in less effective decision making?
One of the greatest surprises in decision science is the
discovery that some of our best decisions are made
through unconscious processes
When subjects in one study evaluated what
psychologist Ap Dijksterhuis of the Radboud
University of Nijmegen in the Netherlands calls a
“rather daunting amount of information” about four
hypothetical apartments for rent—size, location,
friendliness of the landlord, price, and eight other
features—those who decided unconsciously which
to rent did better. (“Better” meant they chose the
one that had objectively better features.) The
scientists made sure the decision was unconscious
by having the subjects do a memory and attention
task, which tied up their brains enough that they
couldn’t contemplate, say, square footage.
There are at least two ways an info-glut can impair the
unconscious system of decision making. First, when people
see that there is a lot of complex information relevant to a
decision, “they default to the conscious system,” says
psychologist Maarten Bos of Radboud. “That causes them
to make poorer choices.” Second, the unconscious system
works best when it ignores some information about a
complex decision. But here’s the rub: in an info tsunami,
our minds struggle to decide if we can ignore this piece …
or that one … but how about that one? “Especially online,”
says Cantor, “it is so much easier to look for more and more
information than sit back and think about how it fits
together.”
CLASS DISCUSSION
Review the last frame.
What are the arguments that the
author uses to show the problems that
can emerge when there is an info-
glut?
Even experience-based decision making, in which you use a rule of
thumb rather than analyze pros and cons, can go off the rails with too
much information. “This kind of intuitive decision making relies on
distilled expertise,” says Kessler. “More information, by overwhelming
and distracting the brain, can make it harder to tap into just the core
information you need.” In one experiment, M.B.A. students choosing a
(make-believe) stock portfolio were divided into two groups, one that
was inundated with information from analysts and the financial press,
and another that saw only stock-price changes. The latter reaped more
than twice the returns of the info-deluged group, whose analytical
capabilities were hijacked by too much information and wound up
buying and selling on every rumor and tip—a surefire way to lose money
in the market. The more data they got, the more they struggled to
separate wheat from chaff.
Which brings us back to the experimental subjects Angelika
Dimoka has put in an fMRI scanner. The prefrontal cortex
that waves a white flag under an onslaught of information
plays a key role in your gut-level, emotional decision-
making system. It hooks up feelings about various choices
with the output of the rational brain. If emotions are shut
out of the decision-making process, we’re likely to
overthink a decision, and that has been shown to produce
worse outcomes on even the simplest tasks.
In one classic experiment, when volunteers focused
on the attributes of various strawberry jams they had
just rated, it completely scrambled their preferences,
and they wound up giving a high rating to a jam they
disliked and a low rating to one they had found
delicious.
How can you protect yourself from having your
decisions warped by excess information? Experts
advise dealing with emails and texts in batches,
rather than in real time; that should let your
unconscious decision-making system kick in.
• Avoid the trap of thinking that a decision requiring you to
assess a lot of complex information is best made
methodically and consciously; you will do better, and
regret less, if you let your unconscious turn it over by
removing yourself from the info influx. Set priorities: if a
choice turns on only a few criteria, focus consciously on
those. Some people are better than others at ignoring
extra information. These “sufficers” are able to say
enough: they channel-surf until they find an acceptable
show and then stop, whereas “maximizers” never stop
surfing, devouring information, and so struggle to make a
decision and move on. If you think you’re a maximizer, the
best prescription for you might be the “off” switch on your
smart phone.
CLASS DISCUSSION
Reread the last frame.
Compare and contrast what the author
describes as a sufficer and a maximizer.
What does the word suffice mean?
READ, REVIEW, AND RECORD
As you reread this article from the beginning,
review the most important claims and supporting
evidence and record careful notes. Your notes will
be used as you write a paper about information
overload and effective decision making. This paper
will be written after you complete your evaluation of
all four articles in this unit of study.
HTTP://WWW.INFOGINEERING.NET/UNDERSTANDING-
INFORMATION-OVERLOAD.HTM
Understanding Information Overload
Information Overload is an increasing problem both in the
workplace, and in life in general. Those that learn to deal with it
effectively will have a major advantage in the next few years.
Information Overload is when you are trying to deal with more
information than you are able to process to make sensible decisions.
The result is either that you either delay making decisions, or that
you make the wrong decisions.
It is now commonplace to be getting too many e-mails, reports and
incoming messages to deal with them effectively.
The Information Overload Age
The first recorded use of the phrase “information overload” was used by the
futurologist Alvin Toffler in 1970, when he predicted that the rapidly increasing
amounts of information being produced would eventually cause people
problems.
Although people talk about “living in the information age,” written information
has been used for thousands of years. The invention of the Printing Press a few
hundred years ago made it possible to distribute written information to large
amounts of people. However, it is only with the advent of modern computers
that the ability to create, duplicate and access vast amounts of information has
created Information Overload amongst the general population.
The root of the problem is that, although computer processing and memory is
increasing all the time, the humans that must use the information are not
getting any faster. Effectively, the human mind acts as a bottleneck in the
Not “Sensory Overload”
Information Overload needs to be differentiated from “Sensory Overload.”
This is when your mind is bombarded with images, sounds and sensations
that overload the brain.
The brain can actually handle tens of millions of signals from our senses
every second. Think of the number of light sensors within the eye, and
equate this to the resolution of a digital camera (and the corresponding file
size of the photos it produces). Then include the thousands of touch-
sensitive areas of the body, and the range of our hearing.
But we can still deal with all of this, because the brain has had tens of
millions of years of evolution to deal with this.
Compare those tens of millions of years to the few thousand years we’ve
been dealing with information such as talking and writing. Our brains are
still learning to deal with this, so we can only process a very small
amount of it at a time.
CLASS DISCUSSION: COMPARE
AND CONTRAST
Compare and contrast the concepts of sensory
overload with information overload?
How do these concepts differ?
Which one seems to have the most negative
affect on decision making? Why?
Causes
Information Overload is now commonplace in offices around the
world. Some of the causes include the widespread access to the
Web and the ease of sending e-mail messages to large numbers
of people
As information can be duplicated for free, there is no variable
cost in producing more copies – people send reports and
information to people who may need to know, rather than
definitely need to know.
Poorly created information sources (especially online) contribute
to the problem and, often, are not simplified or filtered to make
them shorter.
The problem is compounded when the information is not
written clearly or contains factual errors or inconsistencies.
As a result, people have to spend additional time
deciphering the information or conducting further research.
CAN YOU SUMMARIZE THE MAIN IDEA
PRESENTED ON THE PRIOR FRAME?
Return to the last frame viewed and
write a 3-4 sentence summary about
the causes of information overload.
How the Problem Spreads
In an office, the problem of Information Overload spreads like a
virus. If one person is suffering information overload, they tend not
to process the information they are handling very well. Rather than
summarizing a report or document, they just pass on the whole
thing to everyone in the office.
Now, the rest of the office must wade through 80 pages to find the
few key pieces of information that are relevant to their jobs and the
decisions they need to make.
POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS
Although there is no simple solution to the
problem of Information Overload, there are some
things that can be done to reduce the problem.
These include:
• Spending less time on gaining information that
is nice to know and more time on things that we
need to know now.
Focusing on quality of information, rather than
quantity (a short concise e-mail is more
valuable than a long e-mail).
Solutions Continued:
• Learning how to create better information (this is what
Infogineering is about).
• Being direct in what you ask people, so that they can
provide short precise answers.
• Using single-tasking and keeping the mind focused on one
issue at a time.
Spending parts of the day disconnected from
interruptions (e.g. switch off e-mail, telephones,
Web, etc.) so you can fully concentrate for a
significant period of time on one thing.
READ, REVIEW, AND RECORD
As you reread this article from the beginning,
review the most important ideas and record careful
notes. Your notes will be used as you write a paper
about information overload and effective decision
making. This paper will be written after you
complete your evaluation of all four articles in this
unit of study.
HTTPS://WWW.MINDTOOLS.COM/PAGES/ARTICLE/AVOIDING-
PSYCHOLOGICAL-BIAS.HTM
Article Four
Avoiding Psychological Bias in Decision Making
In this article, we'll look at common types of bias, and
we'll outline what you can do to avoid them. What is
Psychological Bias? Psychologists Daniel Kahneman, Paul
Slovic, and Amos Tversky introduced the concept of
psychological bias in the early 1970s. They published their
findings in their 1982 book, "Judgment Under Uncertainty.“
They explained that psychological bias – also known as
cognitive bias – is the tendency to make decisions or take
action in an illogical way.
For example, you might subconsciously make selective use
of data, or you might feel pressured to make a decision by
powerful colleagues.
Psychological bias is the opposite of common sense and
clear, measured judgment. It can lead to missed
opportunities and poor decision making.
Common Psychological Biases
Below, we outline five psychological biases that are common in
business decision making. We also look at how you can overcome
them, and thereby make better decisions.
1. Confirmation Bias
As we showed above, confirmation bias happens when you
look for information that supports your existing beliefs, and
reject data that go against what you believe. This can lead you
to make biased decisions, because you don't factor in all of
the relevant information.
CAN YOU EXPLAIN THE IDEA OF
CONFIRMATION BIAS AS PRESENTED ON
THE PRIOR FRAME?
Return to the last frame viewed and
write a 3-4 sentence summary about
confirmation bias and why it affects
Decision making.
A 2013 study found that confirmation bias can affect the
way that people view statistics. Its authors report that
people have a tendency to infer information from statistics
that supports their existing beliefs, even when the data
support an opposing view. That makes confirmation bias a
potentially serious problem to overcome when you need to
make a statistics-based decision.
How to Avoid Confirmation Bias
Look for ways to challenge what you think you see. Seek out
information from a range of sources, and use an approach such as
the Six Thinking Hats Add to My Personal Learning Plan technique
to consider situations from multiple perspectives. Alternatively,
discuss your thoughts with others. Surround yourself with a diverse
group of people, and don't be afraid to listen to dissenting views.
You can also seek out people and information that challenge your
opinions, or assign someone on your team to play "devil's
advocate" for major decisions.
CAN YOU SUMMARIZE THE MAIN IDEA
PRESENTED ON THE PRIOR FRAME?
Return to the last frame viewed and
write a 3-4 sentence summary about
the causes of information overload.
2. Anchoring
This bias is the tendency to jump to conclusions – that is, to
base your final judgment on information gained early on in the
decision-making process. Think of this as a "first impression"
bias. Once you form an initial picture of a situation, it's hard
to see other possibilities.
How to Avoid Anchoring
Anchoring may happen if you feel under pressure to make a
quick decision, or if you have a general tendency to act
hastily. So, to avoid it, reflect on your decision-making history,
and think about whether you've rushed to judgment in the
past.
Then, make time to make decisions slowly, and be ready
to ask for longer if you feel under pressure to make a
quick decision. (If someone is pressing aggressively for a
decision, this can be a sign that the thing they're pushing
for is against your best interests.)
• 3. Overconfidence Bias
This happens when you place too much faith in your own
knowledge and opinions. You may also believe that your
contribution to a decision is more valuable than it actually
is.
You might combine this bias with anchoring, meaning that
you act on hunches, because you have an unrealistic view
of your own decision-making ability.
In a 2000 study, researchers found that entrepreneurs are
more likely to display the overconfidence bias than the
general population. They can fail to spot the limits to their
knowledge, so they perceive less risk. Some succeed in
their ventures, but many do not.
How to Avoid Overconfidence Bias
Consider the following questions:
• What sources of information do you tend to rely on when
you make decisions?
• Are these fact-based, or do you rely on hunches?
• Who else is involved in gathering information?
• Has information been gathered systematically?
4. Gambler's Fallacy
With the gambler's fallacy, you expect past events to influence
the future. A classic example is a coin toss. If you toss a coin
and get heads seven times consecutively, you might assume
that there's a higher chance that you'll toss tails the eighth
time.
Often, the longer the run, the stronger your belief can be
that things will change the next time. However, in this
example, the odds are always 50/50.
The gambler's fallacy can be dangerous in a business
environment. For instance, imagine that you're an
investment analyst in a highly volatile market. Your four
previous investments did well, and you plan to make a new,
much larger one, because you see a pattern of success.
In fact, outcomes are highly uncertain. The
number of successes that you've had previously
has only a small bearing on the future.
CLASS DISCUSSION
• What is the gambler’s fallacy?
• If you buy a lottery every day for five years, is it
more likely that tomorrow the ticket you buy
will be a winner”
• What does probability have to do with the
gambler’s fallacy?
5. Fundamental Attribution Error
This is the tendency to blame others when things go
wrong, instead of looking objectively at the situation. In
particular, you may blame or judge someone based on a
stereotype or a perceived personality flaw.
For example, if you're in a car accident, and the other
driver is at fault, you're more likely to assume that he or
she is a bad driver than you are to consider whether bad
weather played a role.
Fundamental attribution error is the opposite of actor-
observed bias, in that you tend to place blame on external
events.
For example, if you have a car accident that's your fault,
you're more likely to blame the brakes or the wet road than
your reaction time.
How to Avoid Fundamental Attribution Error
It's essential to look at situations, and the people involved in them,
non-judgmentally. Analyzing cause and effect relationships is a far
better way to solve problems than playing the blame game.
Attributing fault to others or to surrounding events may not always
be accurate. Blaming or scapegoating is an ineffective way to address
important issues.
Key Points
Psychological bias is the tendency to make
decisions or take action in an unknowingly
irrational way. To overcome it, look for ways to
introduce objectivity into your decision
making, and allow more time for it.
Use tools that help you assess background
information systematically, surround yourself with
people who will challenge your opinions, and
listen carefully and empathetically to their
views – even when they tell you something you
don't want to hear.
READ, REVIEW, AND RECORD
As you reread this article from the beginning,
review the most important ideas and supporting
evidence and record careful notes. Your notes will
be used as you write a paper about information
overload and effective decision making.
Combine your notes from all four articles and write
a 2-3 page paper exploring the problem of
Information Overload.
INFORMATION OVERLOAD AND DECISION MAKING:
READ, DISCUSS, AND WRITE
The final activity of this unit is to write a two or
three page paper comparing and contrasting the
main ideas of the four articles. The claims
presented in each article should be reviewed and
evaluated as you reach your own conclusion about
the topic of information overload and decision
making.

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Dean R Berry Decision Making: Information Overload

  • 1. INFORMATION OVERLOAD AND DECISION MAKING By Dean Berry, Ed. D www.commoncorecurriculum.info
  • 2. In this unit of study students will read four academic articles that deal with a complex issue. Challenging words will be highlighted in gold so they can be carefully reviewed for meaning and practiced using the web site www.quizlet.com. Students may search for these words on quizlet by using the quizlet search box and typing in Information Overload 1 for the first article and Information Overload 2 for the second article and so on. Quizlet will enable students to learn these difficult words using several different activities and quizzes.
  • 3. INFORMATION OVERLOAD AND DECISION MAKING: READ, DISCUSS, AND WRITE Prior to reading, students will study the key words using www.quizlet.com . During the reading, students will apply close reading skills so they can unpack complex text and decipher the author’s intended meaning. Articles will be carefully read and discussed with a focus on author’s claims and supporting evidence. In most cases, sections will be reread several times to help extract precise details and evaluate conclusions. After reading an entire article, students will write a brief summary of the claims that are supported by clear evidence and the conclusions that can be drawn. The process of reading, discussing, and writing will be repeated for all four articles that are provided for this unit of study. The theme of this unit is information overload. The final activity of this unit will be to write a two or three page paper comparing and contrasting the main ideas of the four articles. The claims presented in each article will be reviewed and evaluated as students reach their own conclusions about the topic of information
  • 4. QUIZLET PRACTICE WORDS FOR ARTICLE NUMBER ONE Study the following vocabulary words before reading the following complex text about information overload. Use www.quizlet.com and learn these words before reading the article. Use the quizlet search box and type in Information Overload 1 in order to study the words that will be used in this article.
  • 5. IDENTIFYING CLAIMS AND EVIDENCE As you read he following article, identify the claims that the author is making about information overload and the impact on decision making. Be prepared to discuss each claim and whether or not it is supported by adequate evidence. Use close reading skills as you reread important sections.
  • 6. DEATH BY INFORMATION OVERLOAD PAUL HEMP FROM THE SEPTEMBER 2009 ISSUE THE HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW Can everyone just stop whining about information overload? I mean, in the knowledge economy, information is our most valuable commodity.
  • 7. And these days it’s available in almost infinite abundance, delivered automatically to our electronic devices or accessible with a few mouse clicks. So buck up, already! Wait a second: Can I just stop whining about information overload?
  • 8. THE FLOOD OF INFORMATION THAT SWAMPS ME DAILY SEEMS TO PRODUCE MORE PAIN THAN GAIN. AND IT’S NOT JUST THE INCOMING TIDAL WAVE OF E-MAIL MESSAGES AND RSS FEEDS THAT CAUSES ME GRIEF. IT’S ALSO THE VAST OCEAN OF INFORMATION I FEEL COMPELLED TO GO OUT AND EXPLORE IN ORDER TO KEEP UP IN MY JOB.
  • 9. Current research suggests that the surging volume of available information—and its interruption of people’s work—can adversely affect not only personal well-being but also decision making, innovation, and productivity. In one study, for example, people took an average of nearly 25 minutes to return to a work task after an e-mail interruption. That’s bad news for both individuals and their organizations.
  • 10. There’s hope, though. Innovative tools and techniques promise relief for those of us struggling with information inundation. Some are technological solutions—software that automatically sorts and prioritizes incoming e- mail, for instance—designed to regulate or divert the deluge. Others prevent people from drowning by getting them to change the way they behave and think. Who knows: Maybe someday even I will enjoy swimming in the powerful currents of information that now threaten to pull me under.
  • 11. The Problem for Individuals Information overload, of course, dates back to Gutenberg. The invention of movable type led to a proliferation of printed matter that quickly exceeded what a single human mind could absorb in a lifetime. Later technologies—from carbon paper to the photocopier—made replicating existing information even easier. And once information was digitized, documents could be copied in limitless numbers at virtually no cost.
  • 12. Digitizing content also removed barriers to another activity first made possible by the printing press: publishing new information. No longer restricted by centuries-old production and distribution costs, anyone can be a publisher today. (The internet, with its far-reaching and free distribution channels, wasn’t the only enabler. Consider how the word processor eliminated the need for a steno-pad–equipped secretary, with ready access to typewriter and White-Out, who could help an executive bring a memo into the world.) In fact, a lot of new information—personalized purchase recommendations from Amazon, for instance—is “published” and distributed without any active human input.
  • 13. With the information floodgates open, content rushes at us in countless formats: text messages and twitter tweets on our cell phones, facebook friend alerts and voice mail on our BlackBerrys, instant messages and direct-marketing sales pitches (no longer limited by the cost of postage) on our desktop computers, not to mention the ultimate killer app: e-mail. (I, for one, have nearly expired during futile efforts to keep up with it).
  • 14. Meanwhile, we’re drawn toward information that in the past didn’t exist or that we didn’t have access to but, now that it’s available, we dare not ignore: online research reports and industry data, blogs written by colleagues or by executives at rival companies, wikis and discussion forums on topics we’re following, the corporate intranet, the latest banal musings of friends in our social networks.
  • 15. So it’s a lot of stuff—but what precisely is the problem? Well, the chorus of whining (punctuated by my own discordant moans) apparently has some validity. Researchers say that the stress of not being able to process information as fast as it arrives—combined with the personal and social expectation that, say, you will answer every e-mail message—can deplete and demoralize you.
  • 16. WHAT IS THE AUTHOR’S CLAIM ON THE PREVIOUS FRAME? Go back one frame and reread the text. Can you find the claim? What does the author use as evidence?
  • 17. Edward Hallowell, a psychiatrist and expert on attention- deficit disorders, argues that the modern workplace induces what he calls “attention deficit trait,” with characteristics similar to those of the genetically based disorder. Author Linda Stone, who coined the term “continuous partial attention” to describe the mental state of today’s knowledge workers, says she’s now noticing—get this—“e-mail apnea”: the unconscious suspension of regular and steady breathing when people tackle their e-mail.
  • 18. There are even claims that the relentless cascade of information lowers people’s intelligence. A few years ago, a study commissioned by Hewlett-Packard reported that the IQ scores of knowledge workers distracted by e-mail and phone calls fell from their normal level by an average of 10 points—twice the decline recorded for those smoking marijuana, several commentators wryly noted.
  • 19. Of course, not everyone feels overwhelmed by the torrent of information. Some are stimulated by it. But that raises the specter of…[cue scary music]…information addiction. According to a 2008 AOL survey of 4,000 e-mail users in the United States, 46% were “hooked” on e-mail. Nearly 60% of everyone surveyed checked e-mail in the bathroom, 15% checked it in church, and 11% had hidden the fact that they were checking it from a spouse or other family member.
  • 20. The tendency of always-available information to blur the boundaries between work and home can affect our personal lives in unexpected ways. Consider the recently reported phenomenon of…[really scary music]…BlackBerry orphans: children who desperately fight to regain their parents’ attention from the devices—in at least one reported case, by flushing a BlackBerry down the toilet.
  • 21. WHAT IS THE AUTHOR’S CLAIM ON THE PREVIOUS TWO FRAMES? Go back two frames and reread the text on the last two. Can you find the claim? What does the author use as evidence? Discuss possible answers with the class and then write your own version of the claim and supporting evidence.
  • 22. The Problem for Companies Most organizations unknowingly pay a high price as individuals struggle to manage the information glut. For one thing, productive time is lost as employees deal with information of limited value. In the case of e-mail, effective spam filters have reduced this problem. Still, a survey of 2,300 Intel employees revealed that people judge nearly one-third of the messages they receive to be unnecessary. Given that those same employees spend about two hours a day processing e-mail (employees surveyed received an average of 350 messages a week, executives up to 300 a day), a serious amount of time is clearly being wasted.
  • 23. WHAT IS THE AUTHOR’S CLAIM ON THE PREVIOUS FRAME? Go back one frame and reread the text. Can you find the claim? What does the author use as evidence? Write the claim and the evidence and share with your class.
  • 24. “Many companies are still in denial about the problem,” says Nathan Zeldes, a former Intel senior engineer, who oversaw the study. “And though people suffer, they don’t fight back, because communication is supposed to be good for you.” Zeldes is now the president of the Information Overload Research Group, a consortium of academics and executives.
  • 25. Another set of problems involves the constant interruptions we face, whatever the value of the content. When you respond to an e-mail alert that pops up on your screen or to the vibration of your cell phone when you’re “poked” by a Facebook friend, you do more than spend time reading the message. You also have to recover from the interruption and refocus your attention. A study by Microsoft researchers tracking the e- mail habits of coworkers found that once their work had been interrupted by an e-mail notification, people took, on average, 24 minutes to return to the suspended task.
  • 26. WHAT IS THE AUTHOR’S CLAIM ON THE PREVIOUS FRAME? Go back one frame and reread the text. Can you find the claim? What does the author use as evidence?
  • 27. The scenario the researchers described was unsettlingly familiar. Dealing with the message that had prompted the alert represented only a portion of the time off task. People often used the interruption as an opportunity to read other unopened e-mail messages—or to engage in such unrelated activities as text-messaging a friend or surfing the web. Surprisingly, more than half the time was spent after people were ready to return to their work: cycling through open applications on their computers to determine what they’d been doing when interrupted; getting distracted by some other work in progress as they moved from one window to another; and reestablishing their state of mind once they finally arrived at the application they’d abandoned nearly a half hour earlier.
  • 28. CAN YOU SUMMARIZE THE MAIN IDEA PRESENTED ON THE PRIOR FRAME? Return to the last frame viewed and write a 2-3 sentence summary of the main point the author is making.
  • 29. Distractions created by incoming e-mail and other types of information also have more-subtle consequences. Research by Teresa M. Amabile of Harvard Business School has identified reduced creative activity on days when work is fragmented by interruptions. And we know from other research that even young workers, who have lots of experience frequently switching from one device or application to another, need uninterrupted periods during which to successfully tackle particularly demanding tasks.
  • 30. Another eerily familiar, if rarely articulated, consequence of information overload is receiving attention from researchers: the delay in decision making when you don’t know whether or when someone will answer an e-mail message. If you don’t hear back in a timely fashion, you’re left wondering: Was your message willfully ignored by the recipient because it ticked him off? Automatically diverted to his junk mail folder? Left for later response? Or is it simply languishing unnoticed because he’s swamped by e- mail? (Some of these questions would be answered if more e-mail recipients—though don’t count me among them— would click on those annoying confirmation-of-receipt requests that some senders activate.)
  • 31. The ambiguity created by this online silence can sometimes be worse than a delayed response, according to Northwestern University researcher Yoram Kalman. Our minds go through a series of semiconscious calculations based on past experience: How long does this person usually take to answer e- mail? Should I bother her with a follow-up? Should I escalate my efforts by leaving a voice mail message, and at which number? Should I walk over to Building D to see whether she’s at her desk? Shout out the window at the top of my lungs? Meanwhile, you may have to put a project on hold for an indefinite period while you await a response that the recipient could provide in no more than a minute or two.
  • 32. What does all this add up to? It’s not easy to quantify the costs of these and other consequences of information overload. But one calculation by Nathan Zeldes and two other researchers put Intel’s annual cost of reduced efficiency, in the form of time lost to handling unnecessary e-mail and recovering from information interruptions, at nearly $1 billion. He says organizations ignore that kind of number at their peril.
  • 33. READ, REVIEW, AND RECORD As you reread this article from the beginning, review the most important claims and supporting evidence and record careful notes. Your notes will be used as you write a paper about information overload and effective decision making. This paper will be written after you complete your evaluation of all four articles in this unit of study.
  • 34. HTTP://WWW.NEWSWEEK.COM/SCIENCE -MAKING-DECISIONS-68627 THE SCIENCE OF MAKING DECISIONS BY SHARON BEGLEY ON 2/27/11 AT 10:00 AM Newsweek
  • 35. Imagine the most mind-numbing choice you’ve faced lately, one in which the possibilities almost paralyzed you: buying a car, choosing a health-care plan, figuring out what to do with your 401(k). The anxiety you felt might have been just the well-known consequence of information overload, but Angelika Dimoka, director of the Center for Neural Decision Making at Temple University, suspects that a more complicated biological phenomenon is at work.
  • 36. To confirm it, she needed to find a problem that overtaxes people’s decision-making abilities, so she joined forces with economists and computer scientists who study “combinatorial auctions,” bidding wars that bear almost no resemblance to the eBay version. Bidders consider a dizzying number of items that can be bought either alone or bundled, such as airport landing slots.
  • 37. . The challenge is to buy the combination you want at the lowest price—a diabolical puzzle if you’re considering, say, 100 landing slots at LAX. As the number of items and combinations explodes, so does the quantity of information bidders must juggle: passenger load, weather, connecting flights. Even experts become anxious and mentally exhausted. In fact, the more information they try to absorb, the fewer of the desired items they get and the more they overpay or make critical errors.
  • 38. This is where Dimoka comes in. She recruited volunteers to try their hand at combinatorial auctions, and as they did she measured their brain activity with fMRI. As the information load increased, she found, so did activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, a region behind the forehead that is responsible for decision making and control of emotions. But as the researchers gave the bidders more and more information, activity in the dorsolateral PFC suddenly fell off, as if a circuit breaker had popped. “The bidders reach cognitive and information overload,” says Dimoka. They start making stupid mistakes and bad choices because the brain region responsible for smart decision making has essentially left the premises. For the same reason, their frustration and anxiety soar: the brain’s emotion regions—previously held in check by the dorsolateral PFC—run as wild as toddlers on a sugar high. The two effects build on one another. “With too much information, ” says Dimoka, “people’s decisions make less and less sense.”
  • 39. RETURN TO THE PRIOR FRAME AND IDENTIFY THE CONCLUSION OF THE STUDY. What was the conclusion that was drawn about the impact of too much information on bidders at an auction? Write your answer down before sharing with the class.
  • 40. So much for the ideal of making well-informed decisions. For earlier generations, that means simply the due diligence of looking things up in a reference book. Today, with Twitter and Facebook and countless apps fed into our smart phones, the flow of facts and opinion never stops. That can be a good thing, as when information empowers workers and consumers, not to mention whistle-blowers and revolutionaries. You can find out a used car’s accident history, a doctor’s malpractice record, a restaurant’s health-inspection results. Yet research like Dimoka’s is showing that a surfeit of information is changing the way we think, not always for the better.
  • 41. CLASS DISCUSSION What are the good things about having quick access to a vast amount of information? How do you use quick information sources to improve your life and the lives of those around you?
  • 42. QUICK WRITE Write a paragraph with a minimum of five sentences describing how your life can be improved by easy access to huge amounts of information.
  • 43. Maybe you consulted scores of travel websites to pick a vacation spot—only to be so overwhelmed with information that you opted for a staycation. Maybe you were this close to choosing a college, when suddenly older friends swamped your inbox with all the reasons to go somewhere else—which made you completely forget why you’d chosen the other school. Maybe you had the Date From Hell after being so inundated with information on “matches” that you chose at random. If so, then you are a victim of info-paralysis.
  • 44. The problem has been creeping up on us for a long time. In the 17th century Leibniz bemoaned the “horrible mass of books which keeps on growing,” and in 1729 Alexander Pope warned of “a deluge of authors cover[ing] the land,” as James Gleick describes in his new book, The Information. But the consequences were thought to be emotional and psychological, chiefly anxiety about being unable to absorb even a small fraction of what’s out there. Indeed, the Oxford English Dictionary added “information fatigue” in 2009.
  • 45. CLASS DISCUSSION According to this article, what is info-paralysis? What is information fatigue? Are they the same thing? If they are different, explain the differences?
  • 46. But as information finds more ways to reach us, more often, more insistently than ever before, another consequence is becoming alarmingly clear: trying to drink from a firehose of information has harmful cognitive effects. And nowhere are those effects clearer, and more worrying, than in our ability to make smart, creative, successful decisions.
  • 47. WHAT IS THE AUTHOR’S CLAIM ON THE PREVIOUS FRAME? Go back one frame and reread the text. Can you find the claim? Identify and write the author’s claim.
  • 48. The research should give pause to anyone addicted to incoming texts and tweets. The booming science of decision making has shown that more information can lead to objectively poorer choices, and to choices that people come to regret. It has shown that an unconscious system guides many of our decisions, and that it can be sidelined by too much information. And it has shown that decisions requiring creativity benefit from letting the problem incubate below the level of awareness— something that becomes ever-more difficult when information never stops arriving.
  • 49. Decision science has only begun to incorporate research on how the brain processes information, but the need for answers is as urgent as the stakes are high. During the BP oil-well blowout last year, Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, the incident commander, estimates that he got 300 to 400 pages of emails, texts, reports, and other messages every day.
  • 50. • It’s impossible to know whether less information, more calmly evaluated, would have let officials figure out sooner how to cap the well, but Allen tells NEWSWEEK’s Daniel Stone that the torrent of data might have contributed to what he calls the mistake of failing to close off air space above the gulf on day one. (There were eight near midair collisions.)
  • 51. A comparable barrage of information assailed administration officials before the overthrow of the Egyptian government, possibly producing at least one misstep: CIA Director Leon Panetta told Congress that Hosni Mubarak was about to announce he was stepping down—right before the Egyptian president delivered a defiant, rambling speech saying he wasn’t going anywhere. “You always think afterwards about what you could have done better, but there isn’t time in the moment to second-guess,” said White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer. “You have to make your decision and go execute.” As scientists probe how the flow of information affects decision making, they’ve spotted several patterns.
  • 52. Among them: TOTAL FAILURE TO DECIDE Every bit of incoming information presents a choice: whether to pay attention, whether to reply, whether to factor it into an impending decision. But decision science has shown that people faced with a plethora of choices are apt to make no decision at all. The clearest example of this comes from studies of financial decisions. In a 2004 study, Sheena Iyengar of Columbia University and colleagues found that the more information people confronted about a 401(k) plan, the more participation fell: from 75 percent to 70 percent as the number of choices rose from two to 11, and to 61 percent when there were 59 options.
  • 53. People felt overwhelmed and opted out. Those who participated chose lower-return options—worse choices. Similarly, when people are given information about 50 rather than 10 options in an online store, they choose lower-quality options.
  • 54. Although we say we prefer more information, in fact more can be “debilitating,” argues Lyengar, whose 2010 book The Art of Choosing, comes out in paperback in March. “When we make decisions, we compare bundles of information. So a decision is harder if the amount of information you have to juggle is greater.” In recent years, businesses have offered more and more choices to cater to individual tastes. For mustard or socks, this may not be a problem, but the proliferation of choices can create paralysis when the stakes are high and the information complex.
  • 55. CLASS DISCUSSION Imagine the following scenario. You have just won $200,000 and your only mode of transportation has been an old skateboard or catching rides from friends and relatives. Your first desire is to find a great new ride. Fortunately, you have the bucks and the time to satisfy this need. How many different brands and models will you have to choose from? Which models should be considered? Being realistic, how many automobile dealers would you probably visit before pulling the trigger on your new ride? Would you buy the new car on your first day looking? How long might you look at autos before snapping one up?
  • 56. MANY DIMINISHING RETURNS If we manage to make a decision despite info-deluge, it often comes back to haunt us. The more information we try to assimilate, the more we tend to regret the many forgone options. In a 2006 study, Iyengar and colleagues analyzed job searches by college students. The more sources and kinds of information (about a company, an industry, a city, pay, benefits, corporate culture) they collected, the less satisfied they were with their decision. They knew so much, consciously or unconsciously, they could easily imagine why a job not taken would have been better. In a world of limitless information, regret over the decisions we make becomes more common. We chafe at the fact that identifying the best feels impossible. “Even if you made an objectively better choice, you tend to be less satisfied with it,” says Iyengar.
  • 57. QUICK WRITE Return to the last frame and use the ideas to write a paragraph about the possible affects of having too much information and too many choices.
  • 58. A key reason for information’s diminishing or even negative returns is the limited capacity of the brain’s working memory. It can hold roughly seven items (which is why seven-digit phone numbers were a great idea). Anything more must be processed into long-term memory. That takes conscious effort, as when you study for an exam. When more than seven units of information land in our brain’s inbox, argues psychologist Joanne Cantor, author of the 2009 book Conquer Cyber Overload and an emerita professor at the University of Wisconsin, the brain struggles to figure out what to keep and what to disregard. Ignoring the repetitious and the useless requires cognitive resources and vigilance, a harder task when there is so much information.
  • 59. WHAT IS THE AUTHOR’S CLAIM ON THE PREVIOUS FRAME? Go back one frame and reread the text. What is the claim made by Joanne Cantor? What does the author use as evidence? Write the claim and the supporting evidence.
  • 60. It isn’t only the quantity of information that knocks the brain for a loop; it’s the rate. The ceaseless influx trains us to respond instantly, sacrificing accuracy and thoughtfulness to the false god of immediacy. “We’re being trained to prefer an immediate decision even if it’s bad to a later decision that’s better,” says psychologist Clifford Nass of Stanford University. “In business, we’re seeing a preference for the quick over the right, in large part because so many decisions have to be made. The notion that the quick decision is better is becoming normative.”
  • 61. RECENCY TRUMPS QUALITY The brain is wired to notice change over stasis. An arriving email that pops to the top of your BlackBerry qualifies as a change; so does a new Facebook post. We are conditioned to give greater weight in our decision-making machinery to what is latest, not what is more important or more interesting. “There is a powerful ‘recency’ effect in decision making,” says behavioral economist George Loewenstein of Carnegie Mellon University. “We pay a lot of attention to the most recent information, discounting what came earlier.” Getting 30 texts per hour up to the moment when you make a decision means that most of them make all the impression of a feather on a brick wall, whereas Nos. 29 and 30 assume much more importance, regardless of their validity.
  • 62. QUICK WRITE Return to the last frame and write a summary of the main idea that is presented in that section of the article.
  • 63. “We’re fooled by immediacy and quantity and think it’s quality,” says Eric Kessler, a management expert at Pace University’s Lubin School of Business. “What starts driving decisions is the urgent rather than the important.”
  • 64. THE NEGLECTED UNCONSCIOUS Creative decisions are more likely to bubble up from a brain that applies unconscious thought to a problem, rather than going at it in a full-frontal, analytical assault. So while we’re likely to think creative thoughts in the shower, it’s much harder if we’re under a virtual deluge of data. “If you let things come at you all the time, you can’t use additional information to make a creative leap or a wise judgment,” says Cantor. “You need to pull back from the constant influx and take a break.” That allows the brain to subconsciously integrate new information with existing knowledge and thereby make novel connections and see hidden patterns. In contrast, a constant focus on the new makes it harder for information to percolate just below conscious awareness, where it can combine in ways that spark smart decisions.
  • 65. CLASS DISCUSSION Use the former frame to help answer this question. What kind of argument can be made that a constant flood of new information can result in less effective decision making?
  • 66. One of the greatest surprises in decision science is the discovery that some of our best decisions are made through unconscious processes
  • 67. When subjects in one study evaluated what psychologist Ap Dijksterhuis of the Radboud University of Nijmegen in the Netherlands calls a “rather daunting amount of information” about four hypothetical apartments for rent—size, location, friendliness of the landlord, price, and eight other features—those who decided unconsciously which to rent did better. (“Better” meant they chose the one that had objectively better features.) The scientists made sure the decision was unconscious by having the subjects do a memory and attention task, which tied up their brains enough that they couldn’t contemplate, say, square footage.
  • 68. There are at least two ways an info-glut can impair the unconscious system of decision making. First, when people see that there is a lot of complex information relevant to a decision, “they default to the conscious system,” says psychologist Maarten Bos of Radboud. “That causes them to make poorer choices.” Second, the unconscious system works best when it ignores some information about a complex decision. But here’s the rub: in an info tsunami, our minds struggle to decide if we can ignore this piece … or that one … but how about that one? “Especially online,” says Cantor, “it is so much easier to look for more and more information than sit back and think about how it fits together.”
  • 69. CLASS DISCUSSION Review the last frame. What are the arguments that the author uses to show the problems that can emerge when there is an info- glut?
  • 70. Even experience-based decision making, in which you use a rule of thumb rather than analyze pros and cons, can go off the rails with too much information. “This kind of intuitive decision making relies on distilled expertise,” says Kessler. “More information, by overwhelming and distracting the brain, can make it harder to tap into just the core information you need.” In one experiment, M.B.A. students choosing a (make-believe) stock portfolio were divided into two groups, one that was inundated with information from analysts and the financial press, and another that saw only stock-price changes. The latter reaped more than twice the returns of the info-deluged group, whose analytical capabilities were hijacked by too much information and wound up buying and selling on every rumor and tip—a surefire way to lose money in the market. The more data they got, the more they struggled to separate wheat from chaff.
  • 71. Which brings us back to the experimental subjects Angelika Dimoka has put in an fMRI scanner. The prefrontal cortex that waves a white flag under an onslaught of information plays a key role in your gut-level, emotional decision- making system. It hooks up feelings about various choices with the output of the rational brain. If emotions are shut out of the decision-making process, we’re likely to overthink a decision, and that has been shown to produce worse outcomes on even the simplest tasks.
  • 72. In one classic experiment, when volunteers focused on the attributes of various strawberry jams they had just rated, it completely scrambled their preferences, and they wound up giving a high rating to a jam they disliked and a low rating to one they had found delicious.
  • 73. How can you protect yourself from having your decisions warped by excess information? Experts advise dealing with emails and texts in batches, rather than in real time; that should let your unconscious decision-making system kick in.
  • 74. • Avoid the trap of thinking that a decision requiring you to assess a lot of complex information is best made methodically and consciously; you will do better, and regret less, if you let your unconscious turn it over by removing yourself from the info influx. Set priorities: if a choice turns on only a few criteria, focus consciously on those. Some people are better than others at ignoring extra information. These “sufficers” are able to say enough: they channel-surf until they find an acceptable show and then stop, whereas “maximizers” never stop surfing, devouring information, and so struggle to make a decision and move on. If you think you’re a maximizer, the best prescription for you might be the “off” switch on your smart phone.
  • 75. CLASS DISCUSSION Reread the last frame. Compare and contrast what the author describes as a sufficer and a maximizer. What does the word suffice mean?
  • 76. READ, REVIEW, AND RECORD As you reread this article from the beginning, review the most important claims and supporting evidence and record careful notes. Your notes will be used as you write a paper about information overload and effective decision making. This paper will be written after you complete your evaluation of all four articles in this unit of study.
  • 77. HTTP://WWW.INFOGINEERING.NET/UNDERSTANDING- INFORMATION-OVERLOAD.HTM Understanding Information Overload Information Overload is an increasing problem both in the workplace, and in life in general. Those that learn to deal with it effectively will have a major advantage in the next few years. Information Overload is when you are trying to deal with more information than you are able to process to make sensible decisions. The result is either that you either delay making decisions, or that you make the wrong decisions. It is now commonplace to be getting too many e-mails, reports and incoming messages to deal with them effectively.
  • 78. The Information Overload Age The first recorded use of the phrase “information overload” was used by the futurologist Alvin Toffler in 1970, when he predicted that the rapidly increasing amounts of information being produced would eventually cause people problems. Although people talk about “living in the information age,” written information has been used for thousands of years. The invention of the Printing Press a few hundred years ago made it possible to distribute written information to large amounts of people. However, it is only with the advent of modern computers that the ability to create, duplicate and access vast amounts of information has created Information Overload amongst the general population. The root of the problem is that, although computer processing and memory is increasing all the time, the humans that must use the information are not getting any faster. Effectively, the human mind acts as a bottleneck in the
  • 79. Not “Sensory Overload” Information Overload needs to be differentiated from “Sensory Overload.” This is when your mind is bombarded with images, sounds and sensations that overload the brain. The brain can actually handle tens of millions of signals from our senses every second. Think of the number of light sensors within the eye, and equate this to the resolution of a digital camera (and the corresponding file size of the photos it produces). Then include the thousands of touch- sensitive areas of the body, and the range of our hearing.
  • 80. But we can still deal with all of this, because the brain has had tens of millions of years of evolution to deal with this. Compare those tens of millions of years to the few thousand years we’ve been dealing with information such as talking and writing. Our brains are still learning to deal with this, so we can only process a very small amount of it at a time.
  • 81. CLASS DISCUSSION: COMPARE AND CONTRAST Compare and contrast the concepts of sensory overload with information overload? How do these concepts differ? Which one seems to have the most negative affect on decision making? Why?
  • 82. Causes Information Overload is now commonplace in offices around the world. Some of the causes include the widespread access to the Web and the ease of sending e-mail messages to large numbers of people As information can be duplicated for free, there is no variable cost in producing more copies – people send reports and information to people who may need to know, rather than definitely need to know. Poorly created information sources (especially online) contribute to the problem and, often, are not simplified or filtered to make them shorter.
  • 83. The problem is compounded when the information is not written clearly or contains factual errors or inconsistencies. As a result, people have to spend additional time deciphering the information or conducting further research.
  • 84. CAN YOU SUMMARIZE THE MAIN IDEA PRESENTED ON THE PRIOR FRAME? Return to the last frame viewed and write a 3-4 sentence summary about the causes of information overload.
  • 85. How the Problem Spreads In an office, the problem of Information Overload spreads like a virus. If one person is suffering information overload, they tend not to process the information they are handling very well. Rather than summarizing a report or document, they just pass on the whole thing to everyone in the office. Now, the rest of the office must wade through 80 pages to find the few key pieces of information that are relevant to their jobs and the decisions they need to make.
  • 86. POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS Although there is no simple solution to the problem of Information Overload, there are some things that can be done to reduce the problem. These include: • Spending less time on gaining information that is nice to know and more time on things that we need to know now.
  • 87. Focusing on quality of information, rather than quantity (a short concise e-mail is more valuable than a long e-mail).
  • 88. Solutions Continued: • Learning how to create better information (this is what Infogineering is about). • Being direct in what you ask people, so that they can provide short precise answers. • Using single-tasking and keeping the mind focused on one issue at a time.
  • 89. Spending parts of the day disconnected from interruptions (e.g. switch off e-mail, telephones, Web, etc.) so you can fully concentrate for a significant period of time on one thing.
  • 90. READ, REVIEW, AND RECORD As you reread this article from the beginning, review the most important ideas and record careful notes. Your notes will be used as you write a paper about information overload and effective decision making. This paper will be written after you complete your evaluation of all four articles in this unit of study.
  • 92. In this article, we'll look at common types of bias, and we'll outline what you can do to avoid them. What is Psychological Bias? Psychologists Daniel Kahneman, Paul Slovic, and Amos Tversky introduced the concept of psychological bias in the early 1970s. They published their findings in their 1982 book, "Judgment Under Uncertainty.“ They explained that psychological bias – also known as cognitive bias – is the tendency to make decisions or take action in an illogical way.
  • 93. For example, you might subconsciously make selective use of data, or you might feel pressured to make a decision by powerful colleagues. Psychological bias is the opposite of common sense and clear, measured judgment. It can lead to missed opportunities and poor decision making.
  • 94. Common Psychological Biases Below, we outline five psychological biases that are common in business decision making. We also look at how you can overcome them, and thereby make better decisions. 1. Confirmation Bias As we showed above, confirmation bias happens when you look for information that supports your existing beliefs, and reject data that go against what you believe. This can lead you to make biased decisions, because you don't factor in all of the relevant information.
  • 95. CAN YOU EXPLAIN THE IDEA OF CONFIRMATION BIAS AS PRESENTED ON THE PRIOR FRAME? Return to the last frame viewed and write a 3-4 sentence summary about confirmation bias and why it affects Decision making.
  • 96. A 2013 study found that confirmation bias can affect the way that people view statistics. Its authors report that people have a tendency to infer information from statistics that supports their existing beliefs, even when the data support an opposing view. That makes confirmation bias a potentially serious problem to overcome when you need to make a statistics-based decision.
  • 97. How to Avoid Confirmation Bias Look for ways to challenge what you think you see. Seek out information from a range of sources, and use an approach such as the Six Thinking Hats Add to My Personal Learning Plan technique to consider situations from multiple perspectives. Alternatively, discuss your thoughts with others. Surround yourself with a diverse group of people, and don't be afraid to listen to dissenting views. You can also seek out people and information that challenge your opinions, or assign someone on your team to play "devil's advocate" for major decisions.
  • 98. CAN YOU SUMMARIZE THE MAIN IDEA PRESENTED ON THE PRIOR FRAME? Return to the last frame viewed and write a 3-4 sentence summary about the causes of information overload.
  • 99. 2. Anchoring This bias is the tendency to jump to conclusions – that is, to base your final judgment on information gained early on in the decision-making process. Think of this as a "first impression" bias. Once you form an initial picture of a situation, it's hard to see other possibilities. How to Avoid Anchoring Anchoring may happen if you feel under pressure to make a quick decision, or if you have a general tendency to act hastily. So, to avoid it, reflect on your decision-making history, and think about whether you've rushed to judgment in the past.
  • 100. Then, make time to make decisions slowly, and be ready to ask for longer if you feel under pressure to make a quick decision. (If someone is pressing aggressively for a decision, this can be a sign that the thing they're pushing for is against your best interests.)
  • 101. • 3. Overconfidence Bias This happens when you place too much faith in your own knowledge and opinions. You may also believe that your contribution to a decision is more valuable than it actually is. You might combine this bias with anchoring, meaning that you act on hunches, because you have an unrealistic view of your own decision-making ability. In a 2000 study, researchers found that entrepreneurs are more likely to display the overconfidence bias than the general population. They can fail to spot the limits to their knowledge, so they perceive less risk. Some succeed in their ventures, but many do not.
  • 102. How to Avoid Overconfidence Bias Consider the following questions: • What sources of information do you tend to rely on when you make decisions? • Are these fact-based, or do you rely on hunches? • Who else is involved in gathering information? • Has information been gathered systematically?
  • 103. 4. Gambler's Fallacy With the gambler's fallacy, you expect past events to influence the future. A classic example is a coin toss. If you toss a coin and get heads seven times consecutively, you might assume that there's a higher chance that you'll toss tails the eighth time.
  • 104. Often, the longer the run, the stronger your belief can be that things will change the next time. However, in this example, the odds are always 50/50. The gambler's fallacy can be dangerous in a business environment. For instance, imagine that you're an investment analyst in a highly volatile market. Your four previous investments did well, and you plan to make a new, much larger one, because you see a pattern of success.
  • 105. In fact, outcomes are highly uncertain. The number of successes that you've had previously has only a small bearing on the future.
  • 106. CLASS DISCUSSION • What is the gambler’s fallacy? • If you buy a lottery every day for five years, is it more likely that tomorrow the ticket you buy will be a winner” • What does probability have to do with the gambler’s fallacy?
  • 107. 5. Fundamental Attribution Error This is the tendency to blame others when things go wrong, instead of looking objectively at the situation. In particular, you may blame or judge someone based on a stereotype or a perceived personality flaw. For example, if you're in a car accident, and the other driver is at fault, you're more likely to assume that he or she is a bad driver than you are to consider whether bad weather played a role. Fundamental attribution error is the opposite of actor- observed bias, in that you tend to place blame on external events.
  • 108. For example, if you have a car accident that's your fault, you're more likely to blame the brakes or the wet road than your reaction time. How to Avoid Fundamental Attribution Error It's essential to look at situations, and the people involved in them, non-judgmentally. Analyzing cause and effect relationships is a far better way to solve problems than playing the blame game. Attributing fault to others or to surrounding events may not always be accurate. Blaming or scapegoating is an ineffective way to address important issues.
  • 109. Key Points Psychological bias is the tendency to make decisions or take action in an unknowingly irrational way. To overcome it, look for ways to introduce objectivity into your decision making, and allow more time for it. Use tools that help you assess background information systematically, surround yourself with people who will challenge your opinions, and listen carefully and empathetically to their views – even when they tell you something you don't want to hear.
  • 110. READ, REVIEW, AND RECORD As you reread this article from the beginning, review the most important ideas and supporting evidence and record careful notes. Your notes will be used as you write a paper about information overload and effective decision making. Combine your notes from all four articles and write a 2-3 page paper exploring the problem of Information Overload.
  • 111. INFORMATION OVERLOAD AND DECISION MAKING: READ, DISCUSS, AND WRITE The final activity of this unit is to write a two or three page paper comparing and contrasting the main ideas of the four articles. The claims presented in each article should be reviewed and evaluated as you reach your own conclusion about the topic of information overload and decision making.