How do people make decisions in times of significant stress and uncertainty, when risks are unknown, benefits are hard to specify, and time pressure forces snap judgments? This is the type of situation we face every day in the time of the coronavirus pandemic, when even going to the store or taking a walk outdoors can feel like an activity that has unknown risks. Naturalistic Decision Making (NDM) is a modern theory of behavior that aims to explain how people make effective decisions even under conditions of uncertainty, and this approach has significant intersections with Two Minds Theory (TMT). It’s important to begin our analysis by noting that NDM was not an influence in TMT’s development. Points of agreement between the theories are therefore evidence for a common understanding of the human mind, rather than a sign that TMT was derived from NDM.
The primary developer of NDM, Dr. Gary Klein, describes his theory as a way to explain how people make decisions with high stakes, that are made under time pressure, and in situations where there is limited information available -- in other words, almost all decisions that are truly important to people! Klein identified two different ways that people approach decisions. The first is highly intuitive, based on seeing features of a situation at a glance, comparing them to one's own expertise, and making a snap decision about a solution. The pattern-recognition search may take several iterations, but once a match is found there is no question about what to do -- a single "obvious" solution presents itself based on one's understanding of the scenario and one's past experiences. In fact, when interviewing fire commanders about how they battled difficult fires, Klein was surprised to hear many people say that they had "never made any decisions." What these expert firefighters meant is that they didn't remember going though a logical decision-making process or considered the pros and cons of different solutions. Instead, they rapidly arrived at a solution by intuitively matching the current situation to a pattern that they recognized from previous experience, and that solution was usually a good one. They often couldn't even articulate their reasons: For instance, one fire commander described his gut feeling that he should get his firefighters out of a burning building, leading them to escape just before the floor they were standing on collapsed. The main fire had been burning unseen in the building's basement, while the crew fought a secondary fire in the kitchen above it. Although the fire commander couldn't identify any explicit clues and initially attributed his lifesaving decision to "ESP," in fact there were some features of the situation like noise, heat, and lack of progress that tipped him off subconsciously that something was wrong. Similarly, power grid operators with greater expertise-based situational awareness had better responses to a simulated power grid outage.
In Klein's view, expertise allows one to recognize typical patterns and solutions, match the right pattern to the right problem, identify anomalies that might suggest a need for a different solution, determine whether an anomaly requires one's attention or is likely to go away on its own, and even make judgments about which problems are most solvable versus which ones are not worth one's time to attempt. Experts can see "invisible" things that novices do not notice: In one of Klein's studies, for example, experienced paramedics easily picked out the experienced fellow paramedic from a series of video demonstrations of CPR. Novices were less likely to identify the capable paramedic from a group of less-experienced people demonstrating the technique. Interestingly, the worst performance of all came from CPR instructors who noticed that the experienced paramedic deviated from the formal rules of CPR that they taught people to use. The instructors were relying too much on rules like always measuring to find the right place on the chest for compressions, while the paramedics recognized their fellow emergency responder's intuitive ability to simply start in the right place. This model has also been applied to self-management of diabetes, with researchers finding that patients with better problem-recognition skills also have better adherence and glycemic control.
The second strategy that people use to make decisions is more deliberative and linear, using mental simulation to explore various aspects of a situation. Mental simulations are limited by people's ability to pay attention. Klein found that they therefore can have no more than about 3 moving parts (parameters that can change to describe the initial state, causal factors, or desired state). It can also include only about 6 steps in getting from the initial to the final state, although skilled mental simulators can "chunk" multiple tasks together into a single step if they have expertise in the area of decision making. (This cognitive limitation is familiar to memory researchers, and is the reason that U.S. telephone numbers have seven digits -- seven is the number of unconnected bits of information that most people's working memory can retain). Mental simulation is most useful outside of a time-pressured, high-stakes situation according to Klein: In other words, it is less useful in the moment, but is especially good for understanding the past or predicting the future. Klein also says that mental simulation and conscious consideration of alternatives is used when people expect some level of external review -- for example, when they need to justify a decision to their superiors or to the media, because these reviewers will expect that alternatives were considered. Managers can improve their subordinates' use of mental simulation by explaining not only the tasks to engage in, but also the rationale or goals behind those tasks -- things that non-experts may not intuitively understand. (In Klein's research, military commanders were much more likely to explain the "what" than the "why," but those who did take the time to explain their goals got better results). Mental simulation, in short, is most useful when experience or skill is low, one has the opportunity or the need to explain one's actions, and when there is enough time for people to think things through carefully outside the actual context of the decision.
Many aspects of Klein's decision-making theory should be familiar to readers of this blog. TMT posits that behavior is affected by two mostly-independent neurocognitive systems, called the Intuitive and Narrative minds. The Intuitive mind works very rapidly and mostly outside of consciousness, similar to Klein's intuitive pattern-matching method of decision making. It directly influences behavior without being mediated through language, as Klein found in high-pressure situations such as the fire commanders' decisions. And it is usually correct, although it can be fooled if it sees false patterns or encounters completely novel situations. The Narrative mind, by contrast, is useful for imaging the future consequences of actions (and particularly their social consequences), and in offering explanations for things that have happened in the past. This almost exactly matches Klein's analysis. In support of the past-present distinction (TMT's principle of "temporal immediacy"), people in higher-pressure situations like firegrounds or theaters of war used Intuitive decision-making strategies 80%-96% of the time. Design engineers and off-site wildfire incident commanders used Intuitive strategies only 39%-60% of the time (still a significant amount, but far from total). And inexperienced decision-makers were much more likely to rely on Narrative thinking than experts were. All of these findings are very consistent with TMT's proposition that immediate decisions are made by the Intuitive mind, while the Narrative mind concerns past or future scenarios and is used when there's time to think. Furthermore, Klein identified a range of effective decision-making strategies, which are shown around the periphery of the cartoon at the top of the page (from Klein, 1998, Sources of Power). Yet all of those strategies are based in the two core cognitive capabilities shown as a castle in the center of the diagram -- the Intuitive and Narrative minds.
Daniel Kahneman (who was a definite influence on TMT) and Gary Klein wrote an article together for the American Psychologist, in which they characterized the fit between their two independently derived theories as "a failure to disagree." These two experts noted that intuitive-decision making can arise from genuine skill in experts, but can also arise from heuristics and biases in less experienced decision-makers. In both cases, the decision-maker is often unaware of the factors that went into his or her decision. But where Klein primarily studied experts in the field whose intuitive decisions were successful, Kahneman mainly conducted laboratory-based decision studies where people had little expertise and the basis for making a choice was often deliberately confusing. Klein and Kahneman therefore noted that the most appropriate question is not "can intuitive judgments be trusted?", but rather "in what circumstances are intuitive judgments most likely to be valid?" As Kahneman suggests, we will do better with logical analysis and mental simulation in most situations where we do not have expertise. Statistical models tend to do better than human judgment in these situations because our naive judgments and overconfidence in unfamiliar situations tend to lead us astray. But as Klein suggests, people can dramatically increase their chances of good outcomes even in uncertain environments like firefighting or warfare (or, we might add, pandemics). The ability to do so will often rely on intuitive judgments rather than explicit logical thinking, but it requires skill acquired through significant experience. Key decision-makers who specialize in exactly the type of situation under consideration are needed -- that's why currently we're all looking to experts like Dr. Fauci at the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases for advice. Taken as a whole, Klein's and Kahneman's research programs show us that there's no good substitute for experience, so the best thing we can do to improve our own decision-making is to practice for the kinds of challenges we hope to encounter. Our Narrative minds can take us part of the way in planning for the future, but the best results will come from Intuitive judgments based on deep experience with similar situations.
Special thanks to blog reader Lane Desborough for suggesting this topic.
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