Brain Freeze: How the Deluge of Information Paralyzes Our Ability to Make Good Decisions

In this article by Sharon Begley, researchers explore how information-overload plays a role in our decision making.

They conducted various scenarios such as selection of apartments, combinatorial auctions, etc. and then giving the participants either some or no information and having them choose at random or on a gut selection or giving them a wealth of data and information regarding their choices. In almost all cases they found that as the amount of information increased, people's selections inevitably became worse (they picked pricier apartments with worse features or lost money on the combinatorial auctions). In essence, they suffered from "information fatigue".

Is this sounding familiar yet? Remember last Thursday? Remember all of the information we had on Japan, and how by the time we were introduced to the second round of events we had all basically burnt out? Public health is very much an information oriented field. And as we saw last class, it takes a lot of information to coordinate any sort of effective response to a crisis.

The article details how often an overload of information can be completely debilitating, resulting in no decision at all. In the public health field if this happened, individuals would suffer greatly as a quick response is often necessary. They also detailed how information overload results in diminished returns. We have all the information, so that by the time we do make a decision, we regret it because we already know so much that we can imagine how the other options may have played out more positively. Text messaging is now a daily part of our lives--think about all the daily conversations you have with someone over texting. Which do you remember? The most recent bit of data trumps what may have occurred only a few minutes beforehand. Just because it's recent, does nothing to ensure that it's accurate either. In the Japan exercise, an organization reported that there was no radiation contamination risk, and at that time that was the most recent information. By the next day, abnormal radiation levels had been detected in vegetables, later milk, later other produce, and now water.

More importantly, data overload causes us to neglect one of our most important decision making tools--our unconscious, our gut, that little voice inside your head. In public health where time is of the essence and we must often make split-second decisions, the unconscious is an important tool, but if it is diminished we often make bad decisions. The article says, "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". This is not saying that your gut is the best option for all decision making, but rather that when it is necessary to use it, it's important to have that tool. Creativity too can become suppressed by overwhelming the mind with information.

Clearly all of these concerns are very relevant to public health. In the moment thinking, creative solutions, multiple options, a need for action all pertain to the ways in which we come up with effective action plans in public health. With the information from this article in hand, perhaps next time we are presented with a complex array of events to put in order we will be better prepared to handle them.