More and less: Designing for high-stakes decisions

The reasons behind bad choices

The most difficult challenge in designing interfaces for high stakes decisions is that human beings are not wired to make rational decisions. In their article, “The Hidden Traps in Decision Making,” John Hammond, Ralph Keeney, and Howard Raiffa describe the “bounded rationality” of human decision making. Hammond et al. demonstrate how first impressions anchor all our later analysis and judgments regardless of how accurate or significant that initial impression was. The first piece of information we get in a scenario has a disproportionately large influence on all subsequent information. We humans also subconsciously seek to confirm our existing point of view. We demonstrate a strong bias for the status quo—that is, we look for reasons to do nothing. We make decisions unconsciously that validate our previous choices. We are also overly influenced by events that are more memorable either because they happened recently or because of their vividness.

Cognitive scientists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky have been studying how people make decisions for over twenty-five years. One aspect of the human decision making process they have explored in depth is called the availability heuristic. In one study, college students making course selections were presented with summaries of evaluations by hundreds of students all indicating one course of study and then presented with a single videotaped testimonial by a student advocating the opposite course. The participants were far more likely to be persuaded by the videotaped testimonial than by the written evaluations, even though the opinion of one student was clearly less relevant than the unanimity of hundreds of others. Regardless of its statistical insignificance, the testimonial was vivid and salient to the participants—and therefore more available—so they wrongly gave it more weight.

Our natural tendency to make irrational decisions only increases as those decisions become more important. Schwartz writes, “As the stakes of decisions involving trade-offs rise, emotions become more powerful, and our decision making can become severely impaired.” The combination of high-stakes decisions and a proliferation of choice leads to situations that are not only unsatisfactory, they are potentially disastrous.

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