| |October - 20188IN MY OPINIONDecisions at the Speed of Technology ChangeBy Linda Hartford, VP & CIO, The University of Iowa, Center for AdvancementHow many decisions have you made today? Probably more than you can remember or count. What to eat, what to wear, what route to take to work, do I want another cup of coffee. Most decisions are simple and automatic. Our environment and technology are changing quickly and additional decision making comes with it. Most of our decisions are not considered life changing, and our automatic decision process is fine. However, student decisions regarding their higher education, like helping a student make the right choices for a career, selecting the right faculty member, or choosing a system that advances an organization can be life changing. Your Brain is LazyYour brain has an automatic system (system 1) and a working system (system 2) and most decisions are made with our automatic system. System 1 and System 2 were coined by Daniel Kahneman is his book 'Thinking Fast and Slow' (2011). Your automatic system keeps checking on activities around you and making quick decisions using heuristics which are shortcuts or rules we use to make decisions. Your working system only kicks in when you need to make decisions that take a larger amount of cognitive ability. This is because the working system of your brain takes a lot of energy. For example, if you have to add 2+2 your automatic brain can do this quickly with little effort. Now try to multiply 242x147, not so simple. You need to stop and put a lot more energy and cognitive ability toward this task which is done by your working system. Biases on JudgementWe believe that good decision making is based on quantitative factors and analysis. We use pertinent information available to decide the best outcome. However, there are other things at play in our minds that we are not aware of when processing information and making decisions. These come in the form of cognitive bias and have an effect on our automatic system (system 1). A few of the biases that affect how we make decisions or how we can influence decisions include: Attribution error ­ with attribution error we tend to look at the persons personality to explain behavior rather than a particular situation. And we do the reverse for ourselves. This could lead to misjudging others. The term was coined by Lee Rossbased on a classic experiment by Jones and Harris (1967).Priming ­ priming occurs when exposure to one stimulus influences how you react to something else (Meyer and Schvaneveldt, 1971). For example, priming of the word food would make you fill in S_ _ P with soup instead of soap. Priming can cause us to make decisions in a certain manner based on information we were provided prior to the decision.Anchoring­anchoring occurs when we make decisions based on one specific piece of information, usually the first piece of information we receive regarding a subject (Kahneman and Tversky, 1974).
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