Tired of too much choice?

In the last post I wrote about the effects of decision fatigue, and its bad effect on the quality of decisions that we make in life.  Hick’s Law is a common principle of design, and is the design consequence that the time it takes to make a decision increases as the number of alternatives increase (a common sight in today’s retail landscape). The law itself is used to estimate the time it will take someone to make a decision when presented with multiple options. Although this has everyday consequences, outlined clearly and sympathetically in Barry Schwartz’s The Paradox of Choice, it also has very serious consequences in emergency situations. For example, when a pilot has to press a particular button in response to an event, then the decision to select the correct button will take longer when there are more options. Read more »

The New York Times reports some interesting findings on the phenomenon of decision fatigue in a recent article which is well worth reading for those who are burdened by a continuous stream of data, meetings and decision making.  Not only is this bad for you and your brain, it means that you end up making really bad decisions which are not in your (or your business’s) best interests! Read more »

Our expectations have powerful effects on our perception and behaviour, and the Expectation Effect is the way in which these changes are a result of both our personal expectations and sometimes the expectations of others too.  When we  become aware of probable of desired outcome (which mostly happens in our brains subconsciously), our perceptions and behaviours are shaped by this, changing the ways in which we react to the outside world.  Expectation effects have been investigated in a number of different contexts and with a number of different names: Read more »

An article on the BBC news website, discusses IBM’s latest development in artificial intelligence, which is modelled on the way that the brain is wired via neural connections which build and strengthen but also adapt and change over time, making the brain plastic and malleable (read about brain plasticity here).  The computer chips used by IBM are capable of rewiring their connections when they encounter new information, in a similar way as that which it is believed biological synapses use in the brain. Read more »