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CHAPTER ONE

The Curse of Too Much Information

Everybody gets so much information all day

long that they lose their common sense.

GERTRUDE STEIN

AT THE VERY MOMENT I REALIZED I HAD TO BUY A NEW CAR, A COLD CHILL came over me. I had flashbacks to a similar event eight years earlier (I keep my automobiles for a while) that turned into unpleasant haggling and tiring drama. Frankly, entering a dentist’s office for a root canal is less disturbing to me than entering a new-car showroom.

I was cheered by the thought that my decision on the car’s make and model would be easier this time, given all the information one can find on the Internet about new cars. And so my hunt began. First, I compared ten models on the car manufacturers’ sites, including trunk size, gas mileage, and dozens of options—fancy ones, such as seat warming and cooling, and not-so-fancy ones, such as GPS location technology and side air bags. Already the number of possible permutations of models and options was becoming enormous. Next, I looked at several dozen written and video reviews from people who already owned the cars. Regrettably, some reviews praised model A but trashed model B, whereas others did the reverse. Then I collected several reports and recommendations from consumer advocate organizations. Add to this already dazzling amount of information the need to make a decision on whether to purchase or lease, along with evaluating the dealers’ special offers, such as cash-back incentives and low financing rates. In just a few days, I had so many facts, figures, and opinions that my head was spinning. To make matters worse, the results of all this effort were inconclusive.

In the end, I visited several car dealers and eventually bought the car I liked. Damn the data, I decided to go with what looked and felt like the right choice! After more than a year, I can honestly report that I am very happy with my selection.

This experience, no doubt, occurs thousands of times a month. Prospective car buyers make conscientious attempts at due diligence by investigating various makes, models, options, and reviews. Some people carefully assess the available information and make a quick, conscious choice based primarily on the data they have collected. But for many others, despite what the data reveal, they often end up delaying their decision and eventually buying the car that pleases them, the one that feels right. These buyers most likely base their decision on what some call a “gut reaction,” one that overrides—but doesn’t necessarily contradict—the data. They experience a deeper form of mental processing that involves unconscious thought and emotions.

But does this approach cause buyers to later regret their decision? Apparently not. Studies, like those carried out by psychologist Ap Dijksterhuis of Radboud University in the Netherlands, have shown that buyers who waited and mulled over the information for a while were more pleased with their eventual purchase than those who made a purchase immediately after reviewing the data.¹ This was true whether they purchased a car or a house. Likewise, Claude Messner and his colleagues at the University of Basel in Switzerland recently found that information overload decreased consumer satisfaction in their choices, and reducing the amount of information increased unconscious thought and choice satisfaction.²

The results of these studies seem counterintuitive. Surely, the more information we have, the better our decisions. Or not? Could this notion, which has been the mainstay of management courses for decades, be flawed? What’s going on here? To explain how unconscious thought and feelings can be so powerful and often make the right choice, we need to understand some basic facts about how our brains deal with incoming information.

The Brain Does Not Treat All Information the Same

The human brain evolved over many years through three basic stages (see fig. 1.1). The oldest part is the brainstem, sometimes called the reptilian brain because it resembles the entire brain of a reptile. This vital area controls and monitors functions necessary for our survival, such as breathing, body temperature, heartbeat, and digestion. Any incoming information that can affect our survival, such as a snarling dog or a burning odor, gets highest priority for processing. Survival information comes first.

Figure 1.1: The three major parts of the brain and the prefrontal cortex.

Just above the brainstem is the next oldest area, known as the limbic system, responsible for processing emotional information and generating emotional responses. This area is often referred to as the emotional brain. Because emotions play an important role in maintaining family and community bonds, as well as in securing a mate, outside stimuli that contain emotional information have the next highest priority.

Finally, the last and largest area of the brain to develop (and thus the newest) is the cortex, or the rational brain. It makes up about 85 percent of the human brain’s weight. Most reasoning occurs in the forward part of this region, called the prefrontal cortex, located just behind the forehead. The prefrontal cortex is responsible for solving problems, making decisions, and controlling emotions. Any incoming cognitive information not vital to survival or wrapped in strong emotion ends up here.

Whenever we respond emotionally to a situation, the limbic system plays a major role. Sometimes the emotional response is so intense that the more rational cognitive processes are suppressed or suspended. We have all experienced situations in which joy, anger, or fear of the unknown overcame our rational thoughts. Such a scene may result in us losing our ability to move (“I froze”) or to speak (“I was dumbfounded”). Alternatively, it can lead us to do or say something that we regret later on when our rational brain perks up and remarks, “I can’t believe you did that!” So how do the information-processing hierarchy and the touchy relationship between our rational and emotional brains explain why consumers who based their choice on feelings were more satisfied with their final selection than those who relied mainly on information? Did emotions take over and the rational brain toss all that information aside? Not exactly.

The Limited Capacity of Working Memory

Psychologists have known for a long time that our short-term memory (now called working memory), located in the prefrontal cortex, has a limited capacity. Back in the 1950s, George Miller from Princeton University’s psychology department suggested that the maximum number of items an individual could hold in working memory was seven, plus or minus two.³ (Perhaps that limit explains classic heptads, such as the seven deadly sins, seven seas, seven wonders of the world, and seven-digit telephone numbers.) However, recent research by Michael Kane (University of North Carolina, Greensboro), Randall Engle (Georgia Institute of Technology), and others suggests that this number is overstated and that our current capacity is closer to three to four items.⁴ Nonetheless, when working memory capacity is reached, something has to happen.

Get a pencil and a piece of paper. Stare at the number below for seven seconds, then look away and write it down. Ready? Go.

3521904

Compare the number you wrote down to the number above. Chances are high that you got it right. Now, let’s try that again, using another number and the same rules. Stare at the number below for seven seconds, look away, and write it down.

9237546302

Check what you wrote down. How did you do this time? Chances are you left out some digits. That’s because your brain treated each digit as a separate item, so your working memory got overloaded and simply ran out of capacity. This can also happen when you include too many variables when making an important business or personal decision. Items can slip out of working memory and not be considered as part of the decision at all. And this might be a good thing.

Dijksterhuis’ studies found that when people were faced with purchasing decisions involving just a few variables, they took time to mull over the options before deciding and were satisfied with their choice.⁵ For those who made impulsive decisions, regret set in as they soon realized they didn’t really want or like what they bought. The results changed considerably when the purchasing decision involved a large number of variables—for instance, buying furniture or a new car. Working memory could not focus on so much information and often chose to focus on just one variable, such as color or size. The end result was that the longer people analyzed their choices, the less satisfied they were with their purchasing decisions. Who were the most satisfied? Those who didn’t spend much time thinking about all the information and just let their emotional brain make the selection.

Researchers in this area are not suggesting that the emotional brain entirely co-opts the decision-making process when working memory is overloaded. Rather, they suggest that just a few salient facts and feelings are processed over time below the level of consciousness—in unconscious thought—while the individual is engaged in unrelated conscious activities. Eventually, this unconscious process renders a decision that we recall and act on.

Exactly what happens in the brain during working memory overload has been the interest of researcher Angelika Dimoka at Temple University’s Center for Neural Decision Making.⁶ She has studied the effects of too much information by working with bidders who are involved in a complex marketing frenzy called combinatorial auctions. These are bidding wars for numerous items that people can buy alone or bundled, such as landing slots at a busy metropolitan airport. The vast number of variables that the bidders need to consider eventually leads to information overload. Dimoka used a brain imaging technique known as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure brain activity in the prefrontal cortex.

As the bidders received more and more information, Dimoka noticed that activity in the prefrontal cortex decreased quickly (see fig. 1.2, page 8). Working memory was getting full and rebelling. The bidders began to make dumb mistakes and bad choices because the prefrontal cortex essentially abandoned its role as the reasoned decision maker. Furthermore, without the prefrontal cortex exerting its control over the limbic system, emotions began to run rampant, causing a rise in the bidders’ anxiety and frustration. This combined effect resulted in many bad decisions or no decision at all. Apparently, if a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, too much knowledge can be paralyzing.

Figure 1.2: Rational processing increases as the number of items in working memory increases. However, after working memory capacity is reached, adding more items of information causes a sharp decline in rational processing, resulting in poor decisions.

One curious characteristic of working memory is the way it assigns importance to incoming information. In any learning situation, we tend to remember items presented at the beginning and the end much better than the items that came in the middle. The opening and closing of a presentation stay with us longer than the material in between. Researchers call this the primacy-recency effect. You probably experienced this effect earlier when you tried to remember that ten-digit number. Chances are high that you remembered the first several digits (9, 2, 3, 7) and last several (3, 0, 2) but had difficulty remembering those in the middle (5, 4, 6).

Figure 1.3 illustrates how the degree of remembering varies throughout a learning situation. At the beginning, working memory has the capacity to process new information, so it commands our attention (the first peak in the figure). However, as the number of new items approaches the capacity limit, anything else coming into working memory is likely to be lost or remembered only partially (the dip in the figure). As the presentation concludes, working memory sorts the information and once again pays attention, this time to the final items (the second peak).

Because of this effect, we are likely to give more importance to the most recent information we receive, while giving little weight to what came earlier. In this day, when information arrives often and fast, we frequently mistake immediacy for quality.

Figure 1.3: How much we remember in a learning situation depends largely on when it is presented. We remember the first and last items best.

Too Much Information or Too Little Attention?

Every instant, the human brain does an enormous amount of information processing as signals race across neurons to keep our minds alert and our bodies alive. Some experts claim that there are as many as a quadrillion (1,000,000,000,000,000) instructions zooming around the brain every second. Granted, many of these signals are handling internal information, such as body temperature, blood pressure, heart rate, movement, and other such functional data. But even if this estimate is only partially close to reality, why does such processing power prevent us from coping with external information overload? Actually, the problem is not processing capacity so much as it is attention span.

As we noted earlier, working memory has a limited capacity. The human brain tries to focus on a small number of items to determine whether they should be stored or rejected. As more items enter the system, attention shifts among them and focus diminishes. In effect, we lose our ability to concentrate on single items long enough to determine their importance. Items blur into a vague mass of unknown importance, and the brain responds with frustration and anxiety.

British marketing analyst Gary Giddings offers a simple mathematical expression for this phenomenon.⁷ He says that the amount of total attention available (A) is equal to the number of items in an information source (s) multiplied by the amount of attention needed to examine each item (a). Thus, A = a × s. Let’s take a closer look at the import of this expression. Total attention available, or A, can be both a constant and a variable. At work, we subconsciously set the attention span time for items based on our previous experiences handling similar problems and by estimating how much time we can devote to the task before something else comes along. As a result, most people have a fairly constant attention span (A) when dealing with information at work. Consequently, if A is constant, then as the number of information items (s) increases, the amount of time spent on each (a) has to decrease. Giddings wisely avoids putting numbers into his equation, because the attention resources and allocations are not that precise.

The total attention available, however, can vary dramatically when the situation changes. For example, the time we are able to attend to a task may be much longer when we are dealing with information related to home activities, such as interacting with a spouse or children, or when involved in a hobby. When I was a superintendent of schools, I often had to struggle to concentrate for just a few minutes on what seemed to be a silly problem that someone should have solved at a lower level. (I had lots of these on some days.) Yet, I could go home that same day and spend hours concentrating on an article about new discoveries in brain research. My attention span increased when the situation changed to something of greater interest to me. This example also explains why most of us are apt to respond to the ring of a cell phone even though we are trying to complete a work-related project. Oh, who could that be? How important is it? Interest perks up, and some of the attention resources devoted to the work project are diverted to musing about—and perhaps answering—the phone call. We might justify this action by saying that we are simply multitasking, but as we shall see in the next chapter, that explanation just doesn’t cut it.

Too Much Information May Not Be Good for Your Health

You know the drill. You want to get some information for a presentation you are giving to the senior vice presidents. As part of your presentation, you want to show your competitors’ sales numbers from the last quarter. You decide to search the Internet or an online database: Hmm, which of the 200,000 sites should I search? Which of the 150 press reports on these companies should I read? Oh, great! There are conflicting sales data from different sources. Which ones should I trust?

Information overload is described as the feeling you get when being inundated by too much information at too fast a pace to use it appropriately. It is often associated with a sense of being overwhelmed and a loss of control. It is not a new phenomenon. In the Bible we find, “Of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh.”⁸ The eighteenth-century French author Voltaire noted, “The multitude of books is making us ignorant.” Only a few decades ago, the major sources of information were radio, television, printed media, and phone calls. Today, we have technologies, such as the Internet, personal digital assistants, computers, smartphones, iPads, and iPods, that allow us to send and receive music, videos, text messages, instant messages, and digital attachments, as well as set up our own social media pages, blogs, and websites.

A few people have the remarkable ability to scan and process enormous amounts of information quickly and accurately—but they are very few and far between. It doesn’t always mean that those people will make a good or even a timely decision. I once had a boss who insisted on amassing copious data and analyzing every possible aspect of a problem and the potential solutions, no matter how trivial the problem. He would write each chunk of data, option, and possible consequence on separate index cards and shuffle them around a table in his office like a battlefield commander planning an invasion. By the time he made a decision, either the problem had resolved itself or no one cared about it anymore.

Most of us have much smaller processing limits, and when those limits are reached, anxiety begins to build. This anxiety is described as perceived information overload, and it may not be good for your health. Researchers Shalini Misra and Daniel Stokols of the University of California, Irvine worked with nearly 500 college students to determine how they responded to perceived information overload.⁹ The students were to consider two sources of information over a six-week period: cyber-based and place-based. The cyber-based sources were those in which information flowed through the Internet and portable technologies. Place-based sources were those that did not involve electronic technologies but came instead from social interactions in physical settings at home, in the workplace, or in the community. These sources also included environmental pollution, noise, crowding, and commuting and traffic congestion.

At the beginning of the study, the participants completed questionnaires about their perceived information overload, perceived stress, health status, activities for contemplation and reflection, and their sensation-seeking levels. This last category was studied to test the notion of whether high sensation seekers would be more resistant to stress than low sensation seekers. Participants answered questions about their general health and identified any stressful life events (such as separation or divorce, illness, personal injury, or death of a family member) that occurred during the previous year. The survey on perceived information overload from cyber-based sources asked the participants if they: (1) were frequently overwhelmed with electronic messages and phone calls, (2) had too many instant messages, as well as Facebook and MySpace messages, (3) were pressured to respond quickly to such messages, (4) were spending too much time attending to their technology, and (5) received more messages than they could handle. Questions regarding place-based sources of information asked whether they (1) felt hassled by their commute to and from work, (2) were bothered by noisy work or home environments, (3) were overwhelmed by the demands of their workplace, and (4) had too little time for rest and recreational activities.

Six weeks later, the participants completed surveys on their perceived stress and overall health. For example, they were asked how often they had health problems in the previous three months and to identify specific symptoms they experienced during that time period, such as headaches, feelings of depression, acid indigestion, and insomnia. Participants who said they had high levels of cyber-based overload in the initial surveys reported in the follow-up surveys that they had higher levels of stress and more frequent and severe health problems. Curiously, the place-based information overload had no discernable impact on stress, but it did have a negative effect on health.

This study had some other interesting findings that executives may wish to ponder. First, individuals who said they were high sensation seekers reported lower levels of stress from cyber-based overload compared to those who said they were low sensation seekers. Second, participants experiencing high levels of cyber-based information overload said they had little time for contemplative and reflective activities. When working memory is crammed with information, there is little room left for self-reflection and for contemplating the consequences of pending decisions.

A survey of business managers in Britain reported by David Bawden of the Department of Information Science at the City University London had some surprising revelations.¹⁰ Two-thirds of these managers believed information overload had caused a loss of job satisfaction and damaged their personal relationships. About one-third believed it had damaged their health, and nearly half believed important decisions were delayed and adversely affected because of having too much information.

Bawden and his colleague Lyn Robinson later went on to describe several forms of strange behaviors that arise when people are faced with overwhelming amounts of information.¹¹ Particularly amusing is the term infobesity, a sort of feasting excessively on information as though it were fast food. Treatments for this condition include information avoidance, which is essentially ignoring relevant and useful information because there is too much of it, and information withdrawal, which is keeping the number of information sources to a minimum.

Then there is satisficing, a coping strategy whereby one takes in just enough information to meet a specific need and ignores the rest. This could be considered a practical approach for one who is not aware of the full range of choices. Simply glean the information that is good enough and do not worry if the best information is unavailable. Many new-car buyers resort to satisficing rather than dealing with the dizzying amount of data on car models. They pick two or three possibilities based on their experience or a friend’s recommendation, and then they seek out some basic information about each: Is the gas mileage reasonable? How well does it survive crash tests? How does it look and feel behind the wheel? And that’s it!

Psychologist Barry Schwartz of Swarthmore College argues that the bewildering variety of choices available in modern life (think not only car models, but the different kinds of cereals, jams, and blue jeans) causes anxiety and has paralyzing effects on our ability to make choices.¹² To him, satisficing is a valid approach because it lowers stress and increases happiness. Although satisficing may be useful when making choices in the supermarket or department store, it may not be an appropriate method for making executive decisions in a business. There are risks to this seemingly sensible option. More effective choices may be overlooked, and the process may be reduced to information avoidance, a potential calamity in the marketing world. To prevent this, there should be a clear rationale to support any decisions made through satisficing.

The Impact of Information Overload on Decision Making

Scientific research on how we make decisions continually undermines the old notion that the more information we have about a situation, the better. As more information bombards us more often and more incessantly, we are discovering that it has detrimental effects on rational processing, problem solving, and decision making. Let’s take a look at what can happen.

Making No Decision

Not long ago, I visited a neighbor who had just bought a fifty-inch flat-screen television with an astounding array of features. The clarity and resolution of the picture were very impressive, and the multiple speakers enveloped me in bone-rattling sound. I was enthralled with this technology because my current television is a twelve-year-old, twenty-seven-inch set with a picture tube (remember those?) and two small front-facing speakers. It occurred to me that a set this old was probably going to fail soon—the perfect excuse to visit a local branch of a national electronics store. After fifteen minutes of roaming around the cavernous place, I found the multiple aisles of television sets. Counting brand names, models, picture sizes, and other options, there were more than 120 different choices. The variety was beyond my expectations, and the data paralyzed my thought processes. Fortunately, a rescue was imminent.

The television sales assistant approached and offered his help. He asked what kind of television set I currently owned and was surprised that it had the old-fashioned picture tube. Before I could say, “I’m just looking,” he proceeded to describe all the models and options. He made his preferences clear, explaining the technical data that proved how sensible his choices were for me. “Which one would you like to take home?” he asked. Overwhelmed by the choices, I thanked him and walked hurriedly out of the store. I pray that my old set will provide a few more years of service before I have to face that scene again.

Numerous studies show that when people are dealing with too much information and have too many choices, they are likely to make no decision at all. For example, Sheena Iyengar, a professor of business at Columbia University, and her colleagues have done a number of “too many choices” studies.¹³ One of these looked at the participation rate of employees in voluntary 401(k) plans offered by the Vanguard investment group. The investment executives were puzzled as to why there was such low participation, given the wide variety of plans that employees could choose from.

The researchers looked at the records of about 800,000 employees in more than 600 different companies. They discovered that as the number of plan options increased, participation in the plans decreased. When there were just two options, 75 percent of eligible employees participated, but when the number of options rose to fifty-nine, participation dropped to 61 percent. The many choices were so overwhelming that 14 percent of participants dropped out, and nearly 40 percent of employees opted not to enroll in any plan. They just could not make a decision. This result was bewildering because the nonparticipating employees not only were sidestepping the opportunity to establish a retirement nest egg, but were also passing up a gift from their employers, many of whom matched employee retirement contributions up to a set amount. At the same time, the employers who thought they were improving the financial well-being of their workers by offering more retirement plans were actually causing enrollment in these plans to drop. A positive goal but a negative outcome.

Even a seemingly simple decision, like buying a jar of jam, can be bewildering if the amount of information is excessive. In a California supermarket, Iyengar and colleague Mark Lepper set up a jam-tasting booth that switched each day between offering an assortment of six jams or twenty-four jams.¹⁴ These were just a small sampling of the brain-numbing 348 varieties available in the jam aisle of the store. Shoppers who stopped by the booth were able to sample each jam and receive a coupon that would take one dollar off every jar of jam they bought.

Not surprisingly, only 40 percent of incoming shoppers stopped at the booth when the researchers displayed just six jams, but that jumped to 60 percent when they displayed twenty-four jams. Obviously, the larger assortment appealed more to shoppers than the smaller one. However, when the time came to select a jam from the jam aisle, the shoppers who had seen only six jams had a much easier time deciding which jam to purchase. Listening in on the shoppers’ conversations in the jam aisle, the researchers discovered that the small assortment helped the shoppers to narrow down their choices, whereas the large assortment left shoppers confused and uncertain about their own preferences. In the end, the shoppers who stopped by the smaller assortment bought six times as much jam as those who stopped by the larger display, even though the latter was more popular. Too many varieties led many to a decision not to buy.

In another study, marketing experts Maria Sicilia and Salvador Ruiz of the University of Murcia in Spain created three versions of a website, each with increasing amounts of information about items available for online purchase.¹⁵ As potential buyers scrolled through the site that had the most product information, they felt overwhelmed and their thoughts drifted away from their purchasing task, resulting in disinterest. More importantly, they made few or no purchases.

Making a Poor Decision

No matter how experienced you are, too much information can derail your decision-making process. This is not a new discovery. As far back as the late 1980s, Paul Andreassen at MIT conducted an experiment with a group of business students who were to buy and sell stocks in an imaginary portfolio.¹⁶ Each student selected a portfolio of stocks. Andreassen then divided the students into two groups. The first group had access to all the financial information they desired. They read financial newspapers, watched financial broadcasts on television, and were able to contact stock market experts for their opinions. The second group, however, could see only the changes in their stock prices, with no information as to why the prices rose or fell. They had to make trading decisions based on this very limited amount of information.

Would you, like Andreassen, have expected the first group with all that information to earn more than the data-limited second group? Surprisingly, that is not how it turned out. The group with less information earned more than twice as much as the info-rich group. It seems the first group was distracted by too much information. The more data they got, the more difficulty they had separating good advice from bad. They made many trades based on rumors and tips—a guaranteed way to lose money in the stock market.

Imagine conducting a similar study today. With so much financial information available in seconds, one wonders what types of decisions individual investors make. One answer is to look at day traders, those people who make dozens of stock trades a day in the hopes of eking out a little profit on each. David Segal of the New York Times cites studies showing that about 80 percent of active individual traders lose money, and only about 1 percent are predictably profitable.¹⁷

Regretting the Decision

Recall the participants in Dijksterhuis’ and Messner’s studies: those who made a decision soon after reviewing all the data grew to regret their choice, whereas those with limited information who delayed their decision had no regrets.¹⁸ One of Iyengar’s studies supports these results.¹⁹ The study involved students who were doing job searches. She and her colleagues looked at the amount of information the students collected about an industry (such as prominent companies, the corporate culture, the cities where the companies were located, and average pay and benefits) and their degree of satisfaction with their choices. The researchers discovered that those students who collected a lot of information were less satisfied with their choices than students who collected less information. Apparently, the students who amassed lots of information knew so much about various job possibilities that they could see themselves doing better later in a job that they did not take. And this same regret occurred even when the individual made an objectively better choice. Professor Schwartz at Swarthmore says that when faced with so many choices, decision makers “may do better, but feel worse.” To him, “too many choices become paralyzing rather than liberating.”²⁰

Once again, we have research results that seem counterintuitive. Having collected all that information, shouldn’t the students have been pleased with the final choices they made? Schwartz says that depends on a person’s goal when making a decision. Based on his research, he suggests that some individuals are satisicers, those who look at the options and settle for good enough. Satisficers have standards, and when they find the option that meets those standards, they choose it. They don’t fret over their choice or whether there might be something better. They move on. Then there are the maximizers, those who want to get the best choice whenever they make a decision. How does one get the best? By searching through all the possibilities—an impossible task even when deciding on jam in a supermarket. At some point, maximizers have to make a decision. Unfortunately, that decision often leads to regret. Regret? How can that be? Surely, with all that information, one should feel secure in the final decision. It doesn’t work that way. Maximizers start wondering, “What if I waited a little longer, or collected more data, or studied the options a little harder, might I have made a better choice?” If the choice they made is disappointing, they cannot escape the realization that the poor choice was their fault because, after all, they had plenty of other options available. Over time, the constant feeling of regret and self-blame begins to wear on maximizers—in some cases, to the point of clinical depression. They eventually become regret-aversive and start to avoid making decisions at all.

How to Deal With Information Overload

Before deciding how to handle information overload, you need to be certain that the problem is really too much information as opposed to too much work. Some people misinterpret work overload as information overload. Do your decision makers have too many duties or too many goals to accomplish, or do they waste too much time in excessive travel? If this is the case, then you need to adjust the responsibilities to be more realistic so that you and your colleagues can achieve your goals. If not, then we can look at some strategies that may help you tackle the perils of too much information and too many choices, and ultimately make good decisions. Note that the strategies focus on you taking control of the information environment rather than feeling controlled by it.

Stick to the Relevant

You live in a world in which information systems are constantly throwing more and more facts, figures, and opinions at you. What you really need are systems that filter out unimportant or irrelevant information. The key ingredient in the attention game is relevancy. The brain is always trying to discern patterns and make meaning out of new information. Relevancy makes our attention span stretch a bit further, improving our information-processing capacity and cerebral efficiency so it takes less time and attention resources to acquire the information we really need.

Disregard the Unimportant

Some corporate emails have the same value as junk mail. Devise a method for recognizing them (for example, by name of sender or topic) and send them immediately to the spam folder.

Apportion Your Time Based on Importance

Not every item of information is equally important. Give the most time to those that really matter and skim or ignore the rest.

Prescreen the Information

Consider having all information pass through an assistant who knows your preferences and sends you only the material you need to see. Occasionally look at a sampling of screened-out material to ensure the assistant is following your directions and to avoid becoming isolated.

Divide the Burden

See if there is someone else in the organization who should be getting some of the information instead of you. Divide the overload, and meet with colleagues, when necessary, to share information and work toward a decision.

Practice Chunking

When faced with too much information, the brain attempts to combine items that have similar characteristics—a process known as chunking. Chunking can increase the number of items that working memory can hold. Get that pencil and paper again. Stare at the letters below for seven seconds. Then look away and write them down in the correct sequence and groupings. Ready? Go.

TVI RSCN NF BIU SA

Check your results. Did you get all the letters in the correct sequence and groupings? Probably not. Most people do not score 100 percent on this after looking at the letters for such a short period. Let’s try it again with the same rules. Stare for seven seconds and write down the letters below in the same sequence and groupings. Ready? Go.

TV IRS CNN FBI USA

How did you do this time? Probably much better. If you compare the two examples, you will note they are the same letters in the same sequence. What happened here? In the first example, the groupings made little or no sense. Thus, the brain treated each of the fourteen letters and each of the four spaces (because grouping is important) as a separate item, resulting in a total of eighteen items. This total well exceeds working memory’s capacity, so you could not remember the example accurately. But in the second example, the brain quickly recognized the five understandable items, and the total was within working memory’s capacity. The major difference between the two examples was how the items were chunked. Chunking improves your ability to remember the items. That ability, however, is dependent on your knowledge base. Because the letter combinations were familiar to you, you were able to chunk quickly and accurately. Recall trying to remember that ten-digit number earlier in the chapter. People who spend a lot of time calling others on the telephone often remember all the digits correctly. That’s because their brains are accustomed to chunking ten-digit numbers as the area code + prefix + extension, so 9237546302 is quickly represented in the brain as (923) 754-6302. Practice chunking by linking relevant items of information together using some common characteristic, such as their similarities, differences, advantages, disadvantages, functions, or structures.

Accept the Practicality of Satisficing

When there is just too much information and too many choices, resist the search for perfection. Realize that your competitors are in the same overload quagmire as you, and, except in extraordinary circumstances, settle for satisficing. If you do the satisficing in a rational—rather than arbitrary—way, then you have a practical and defensible approach to information management.

Value the Power of Unconscious Thought

You will recall that the studies of Dijksterhuis, Messner, and Iyengar revealed that those participants who got less information, who pondered over it, and who delayed their decisions were much more pleased with their final choices than those who amassed large amounts of data and made a quick decision.²¹ For the latter, regret over their choices eventually set in. These results point to the value of unconscious thought. Allowing information to settle and percolate in our unconscious system may ultimately provide the best decision. But too much data can impair the unconscious processes. Loran Nordgren and his colleagues Maarten Bos and Ap Dijksterhuis, for instance, found that when people face a large amount of complex information, they tend to default to their conscious system, a path that often results in poorer choices.²²

So what’s the answer? Do you ignore some of the information and settle for satisficing? In a word, yes. But even that approach can have its challenges; when faced with an information avalanche, your brain has a difficult time deciding which items to ignore. This is especially true when you are gathering information online because every new item links to other new items and so on. Furthermore, it is often difficult to determine the validity and reliability of online information. The researchers suggest that the best strategy, then, may be to use your conscious mind to acquire and screen only the relevant information, move on to some other tasks while the unconscious processes do their work, and then make a decision. With this approach, you are taking advantage of the strengths of both the conscious and unconscious systems and limiting their weaknesses. Several of their studies confirm that the best decisions involving complex choices engage both conscious and unconscious thought and that this sequence is better than conscious or unconscious thought alone. These findings might be difficult to accept because they seem to contradict the notion that the more rational thought given to a complex decision, the better. How do researchers explain this conscious/unconscious paradox?

The Conscious/Unconscious Paradox

As we learn and develop more expertise in our work, the brain builds large and robust information and skill banks in our long-term memory. It also establishes networks that remember the feelings associated with our experiences. Because the emotional brain has a powerful and resilient memory system, we tend to remember the best and worst things that happen to us. We forget mediocre and uneventful experiences quickly. Can you remember what you had for dinner a week ago last Thursday? Probably not, unless it was a special occasion or you got sick from the food. In those instances, the good or bad emotional responses helped you to remember the meal. Whenever you have made an important decision that resulted in a spectacular success or a disappointing failure, your brain retained your feelings of joy or gloom as part of the experience. Over time, these cognitive decisions and their emotional messages form a rich pool of experiences through which you can filter a potential new decision. But that takes time.

The rational brain is very competent at making mundane decisions, such as picking a shirt to wear to work, and at solving simple problems, such as balancing your checkbook. Emotions do not really matter much here. Complex problems are a different story because of their possible consequences. We noted earlier how the prefrontal cortex becomes very inefficient when bombarded by too much information. As a result, you may overanalyze the information and select a choice that you may soon regret (see first example in fig. 1.4, page 22). However, if you use information management strategies to limit the incoming items and avoid rushing to a decision, then your rational brain has the time to explore your pool of experiences and link new information to similar emotion-laden decisions of the past. Now your unconscious thought process can examine options based on your past experiences (assuming you have had a sufficient number of them in your work domain) and render a better decision (see second example in fig. 1.4). This process honors intuition in that the final decision “feels right.” Emotional messages play a strong role here, and we will discuss much more about the power of emotions in chapter 3.

Figure 1.4: In the upper diagram, too much information overloads the prefrontal cortex, resulting in a quick and poor decision followed by regret. In the lower diagram, information management strategies slow down the process and produce a better decision.

A Final Word About Information and the Brain

This chapter has been devoted to deflating the corporate tenet that the more information people have, the better decisions they will make. The reality is that the brain’s prefrontal cortex has a limited capacity for information, and when overloaded, it is likely to make a decision that seems important but really isn’t. In short, less is more!

Another pervasive corporate tenet is that modern technology allows employees to multitask, thereby improving their efficiency. Really? Can the brain actually multitask? If so, how does that work? And can employees get better at it? If not, why not? You will find the answers to these questions in the next chapter—and they may surprise you.