Two marketing professors were able to demonstrate that hard, unimportant tasks lead us into decision quicksand:
In the first experiment, 106 participants in Amazon’s Mechanical Turk online labor market were presented with real-world choices about which task they’d take on, for pay. They could either change their decision later, or not (making it “important” or “unimportant”). And the choice either involved a choice between two jobs, in which one was clearly more pleasant for the money involved, or among four jobs, with various plusses and minuses (making it “difficult” or “easy”).
The Mechanical Turkers, as they’re known, spent roughly the same amount of time making the easy decisions, regardless of whether they were important or unimportant. (After all, they were easy decisions!) They spent a little longer on the hard, important decisions, though the difference wasn’t statistically significant. But they spent much more time on the hard, unimportant decisions — in fact, double the time they spent on the easy, unimportant decisions. Afterwards, these people also reported themselves less happy about the process.
The researchers basically repeated the experiment using decisions about hypothetical airline flights and course selections, finding the same result: Faced with complexity, and urgency, we can be decisive. Faced with complexity, and no urgency, we waste our time. Researchers referred to the tendency as “decision quicksand.”
In the context of unimportant-but-challenging decisions, people were more inclined to seek out fresh sources of information, dragging out the decision. When they were misled into thinking that they’d spent more time on an unimportant decision than they actually had — a stopwatch was sped up — they chose to spend even more time, effectively doubling down on their time investment.
Interesting stuff, though this looks like yet another instance of researchers hanging broad, interpreted, unwarranted labels on something.
“Important” decisions? Ah. Maybe. But why not stick with what they actually measured, and not just assert, out of the blue, that these decisions were “important” or “unimportant”?
I suppose important vs. unimportant and easy vs. difficult aren’t perfect labels, but what one-word labels would you suggest instead?
Anyway, the abstract spells out their point more clearly:
Well, I’d object to the idea that there needs to be a one word label. Although, using such a one word label, I suppose, raises the perceived importance of the study. :)
But then, right now I’m looking at two edit windows, one with this posting and comment, the other with paid work I’m behind on. Let’s not spend too much time dwelling on Which I am thinking about and typing in to.
So, is making this blog comment another example of what they have measured? If so, then perhaps what they have identified and measured is the human tendency to not optimally use all moments of time. Now, looking at it like that, it appears that they have discovered the sky is blue and the pope’s Catholic. But, because their discovery has been translated to one word interpretations and/or because their discovery has a lot of confusing detail, their study appears “important”.
Let’s all get back to work.
“The Law of Triviality… briefly stated, it means that the time spent on any item of the agenda will be in inverse proportion to the sum involved.”
— C. Northcote Parkinson