You make decisions quicker and based on less information than you think you do. In this article Nadav Klein from the University of Chicago (2018) has published research on how humans make decisions. See below:
We live in an age of information. In theory, we can learn everything about anyone or anything at the touch of a button. All this information should allow us to make super-informed, data-driven decisions all the time. But the widespread availability of information does not mean that you use it even if you have it. In fact, people readily make data-poor snap judgments in a variety of instances. People form lasting impressions of others in the span of milliseconds, and consumers make shopping decisions based on little deliberation.
And it would help when you’re deciding how much information to acquire when making your own decisions. How long should you try out a subscription service before deciding whether you like it enough to pay? How much time should you date a love interest before deciding to tie the knot?
You probably believe you take a ton of research into account before you make a big choice … but you probably don’t.
In one study, researchers asked participants to imagine having pleasant or unpleasant interactions with another person. In comparison, they asked another group of participants to predict how many of those interactions they would need to experience to determine someone’s character. They found that people believed they would need many interactions to make this judgment, when in fact the first group needed few. In another study, they asked MBA students to write applications for hypothetical management positions and then asked actual HR people to read their materials. Their applicants wrote and shared much more material than the hiring professionals cared to read.
They also asked people who have never been married to predict how long, after meeting their future spouse, it would take them to decide that this person is “the one.” Fully 39 percent of these never-marrieds thought they would need to date this person more than year before they’d feel ready to spend the rest of their lives with him or her. In contrast, married people reported having made this judgment much more quickly, with only 18 percent stating that it took them more than a year to do so. Similar mispredictions occur when evaluating subscription services based on trial periods, tasting novel beverages, and evaluating streaks of luck, athletic performances, and academic grades. In all cases, people believed they would use more information than they actually did.
The human mind processes information incrementally. A naive perspective might imagine that new information stacks on top of old information until some mental threshold is reached for making a decision. In reality, however, research suggests that information aggregation is much closer to an exponential function; the first few pieces of information are weighted more heavily than later information. Another possibility is that people fail to realize how rich and engrossing each separate piece of information is. In psychology, this is called an empathy gap. Consider the question of how many interactions are necessary for you to decide whether you like and trust someone. It may be tempting to believe you’ll rationally evaluate each interaction as you would a dry statistic. But social encounters are vivid and engaging, and the first experience may simply be so absorbing as to tilt your judgment irrevocably, making future interactions unnecessary.
In plenty of cases, a quick decision is just fine. It is not clear that quick decisions are always bad. Sometimes snap judgments are remarkably accurate, and they can save time. It would be crippling to comb through all the available information on a topic every time a decision must be made. Take the problem of self-fulfilling prophesies. Imagine a situation in which a manager forms a tentative opinion of an employee that then cascades into a series of decisions that affect that employee’s entire career trajectory. A manager who sees an underling make a small misstep in an insignificant project may avoid assigning challenging projects in the future, which in turn would hamstring this employee’s career prospects.
I will share an experience I had in my 20s using a very detailed dating app with an incredibly data rich backing algorithm. My potential match was 92%. In other words, there was a lot of common ground and on paper compatibility. I was engaging with the person for a while and was then considering whether to go on that first “coffee date”. I then re looked at the profile and saw an alarming gap that I had not noticed before. The section on animals was missing entirely. I emailed the person and asked the question – “how do you feel about animals?” to which the response was – I don’t mind them as long as they are behind the fence in a zoo.” This for me was a complete deal breaker and had I listed this element as non-negotiable I would not have bothered interacting in the first place. We all have these non-negotiables at a sub conscious level even if we think we don’t. That is why we would rather send you 3 brilliant candidate options that we are at least 90% sure you would want to hire rather than spamming you with poor fits who will just clutter both your mind and your time.
We take the time to get to know exactly what the client needs and wants. Your time is money, and we want to get the best result with the least amount of toing and froing as possible.