blink

I just finished reading a really interesting book called 'Blink,' which discusses the psychology behind intuition and snap judgments. It cites cases from all different fields - from tennis, to criminology, to art, to autism - to show how many times we make better decisions when we focus only on our intuition, or that 'gut feeling' we get when exposed to a situation in the first few seconds - as long as it takes us to blink. More often than not, when we are exposed to all of the details of a situation, and our knowledge of that situation increases, our ability to make a good decision decreases. The book gave dozens of examples of this thought process, as well as studying people who are known for intuitive decision-making, such as fire-fighters, police officers, military, and Wall Street traders, who are all in situations where important decisions need to be made quickly and often based upon little information.

One case cited was the United States' war games of 2002, called the Millenium Challenge. In this hypothetical situation, an extremely anti-American terrorist leader was hiding in the Middle East, and posing a threat to U.S. national security. Sound familiar? That's because these war games were essentially the testing ground for the Iraq War. To test strategy, military officials were split into two groups - the Blue Team, which represented the U.S. government, and the Red Team, which represented the Middle Eastern terrorists. The Blue Team was provided with incredibly advanced and technical information about the enemy - psychological evaluations, military positions and strategy, and entire databases describing every available detail about the terrorist organization's military setup. The Red Team, under the guidance of a well-known military general operated under the strategy of intuition and spontaneity. Although their leader was incredibly well-educated in military theory, they operated based on very little information - essentially flying blind. And over the course of several months, as the war games played out, the Red Team succeeded in destroying every U.S. stronghold, assassinating political leaders allied with the U.S., eventually ending in complete defeat for the Blue Team. The government was in shock. Years of military information technology research had resulted in nothing - and had in fact weakened their military position. After an assessment period, the Department of Defense, in typical American fashion, destroyed the results, and called for a 'redo' of the games - this time, with the Red Team operating predictably according to a script, ending, of course, with a Blue Team victory. Then the U.S. confidently went to war, satisfied that their information technologies were indeed proven to be the best military strategy. Unfortunately, as we've seen over the past few years, that's not how the real world works. Success is often determined, not by an overload of information, but by the ability to act quickly and respond to changes in stimuli with gut reactions.

Today, I was thinking about how accurate this theory is in my own life, and what came to mind was something that I've been working through during the past year or so. I trusted someone completely - he was the person I went to with my deepest secrets, and asked for advice on all the most important decisions, and considered to be one of my greatest role models. We became very close friends, and it got to the point where not a day went by that we didn't talk. My closest friends watched what was happening, and were concerned. They knew this could be heading nowhere good - based on what they saw, and what I told them, this was downright scary. But I ignored that. They didn't know him. They didn't have the relationship that I had with him. I knew the most intimate details of his life, and I knew every aspect of his personality. There couldn't be a problem. But of course, there was. And I never saw it coming. I think this is the sort of situation that 'Blink' is talking about. I was too close to the situation. I was surrounded by too much information - emotions and details that kept me from seeing the underlying and basic truth - that there was something very wrong. My friends, on the other hand, were more removed from the situation, and thus only knew the basic details, and this was enough to make an instinctual decision, and ultimately the right one.

So maybe too much information isn't always better. Maybe the whole idea of a well-informed decision is a contradiction. And instead, sometimes maybe we should just learn to listen to our hearts.