you so that you are able to get past the spin and evaluate the underlying substance. Empowering you so that you can challenge conventional wisdoms and determine what to replace them with. Empowering you so that you are not cowed by authority figures or over-confident experts, and are able to assess their opinions as you would the opinions of any others.
Empowering you so that you’re not ashamed to ask for help when you need to, but have the skills to be able to identify who best to get this help from, and how. Empowering you to be able to look into your own psyche, so that you can identify ways in which you may be sabotaging your own decision-making.
The goal of this book is to empower all of us to become more confident, more independent and wiser thinkers and decision-makers. To become people who neither blindly accept the dictates of others nor unquestioningly follow our own initial instincts or analysis – people able to face the world with eyes wide open, and make smart choices and decisions for ourselves.
QUICK TIPS FOR GETTING TO GRIPS WITH A WORLD IN HYPER-DRIVE
• Commit to becoming an Empowered Decision-Maker.
• See the Ten Steps as the tool kit to help you in this quest. The Tips that follow will get you thinking – they will get you started on your journey. We will develop them further as the book progresses.
• Become aware that we have to make over 10,000 decisions a day. Begin to think about which of these you actually need to make, and whether you are really prioritising the important ones.
• Start thinking about how it is you make decisions. Do you consult others and gather a range of opinions, or do you take everything upon yourself? Do you make decisions quickly? Or do you tend to want to mull options over first?
• Start noting who or what typically influences the choices that you make.
• Acknowledge that smart decision-making needs time and space. Begin to think about how you can reshape your environment to achieve this. How can you limit distractions and disruptions? Can you take technology-free Sabbaths? Can you initiate a new policy at work that limits who is cc’d on emails and under which circumstances?
• Start considering how you have typically viewed experts and conventional big-hitters until now. Do you tend to accept their views and ideas without question?
• Ask yourself more generally who it is you trust and why.
• Contemplate your current strategies for dealing with the digital deluge. Think about the short cuts you take, and how you determine which information to base your decisions on. Begin thinking about how these may be impacting on the quality of your thinking.
See the Tiger and the Snake
The Tiger and the Snake
In 2005, the prominent American cognitive psychologist Professor Richard Nisbett began an extraordinary experiment.
After some careful planning, he showed a group of American students and a group of Chinese students a set of images for just three seconds each. The images were pretty varied: a plane in the sky, a tiger in a forest, a car on the road – you get the idea.
How would the American and Chinese students view these images, the Professor wondered. Would they see them differently? Would they see the same things? If there was a snake on the ground, say, would the Americans or the Chinese notice it?1
The Professor’s methods were clinical. Upon entering the room, the students were placed in a chair, with their chins in a chin rest at a distance of precisely 52.8cm from the screen. They were then strapped in to 120Hz head-mounted eye-movement trackers. Nisbett could track every squint, glance or flicker of attention.
The differences between the two sets of students were immediately apparent.
The Americans focused on the focal object: the plane, the tiger, the car. They pretty much fixated on these, and barely looked at the background.
The Chinese, on the other hand, took longer to focus on the focal object – 118 milliseconds longer. And once they had done that, their eyes continued to dart around the image. They took in the sand, the sunlight, the mountains, the clouds, the leaves.
So if there was a snake on the ground behind the tiger, it would be the Chinese, not the Americans, who would see it.
All That Glitters …
In a complex world of hidden dangers and fleeting opportunities we all need to be able to see snakes as well as tigers.
We have to understand that the picture we see at first may not give us all the information we need to make the best possible decision. We need to learn to see beyond what is obvious, beyond what we are culturally or conventionally attuned to focus on.
Of course, this doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t ever act until we’ve gathered every single piece of information out there that may be relevant to our decision. That would be excessively time-consuming, and our brains wouldn’t be able to cope with all that data anyway.2
But what the tiger-and-the-snake experiment tells us is that the information we’re most prone to focus on may only give us a very partial story, a fragment of the truth, and therefore risks misleading us. Being aware of this, and adjusting accordingly, will make a profound difference to the decisions you make.
Take internet dating. Studies show that men are most attracted to photos of women with large eyes, a big smile and high cheekbones.3 Glossy hair, full lips and smooth skin are also a big draw.4 It’s also the case that women who describe themselves as ‘voluptuous’ or ‘portly’, or ‘large but shapely’, are contacted far less online than women who are slightly underweight.5
That’s how it goes with a lot of male browsers. What about women? Well, women seem to focus more on height. Men listed as between six foot three and six foot four receive about 60 per cent more first-contact emails than men in the five foot seven to five foot eight category.
But are superficial features such as the fullness of a woman’s lips or a man’s height really the best things to focus on if you’re looking to choose the right partner?
The answer, unsurprisingly, is a categorical ‘no’. Studies of successful long-term relationships point to less superficial qualities such as sense of humour, shared interests and common values as being much better indicators of whether a couple are well matched.6 Deep down, most of us know this, yet the majority of online daters only focus on one part of the picture.
Politicians, economists and investors can easily fall in to the same trap.
They
