Thank you. Descrtes Error is indeed a fantastic book. It was one of the books featured on on my Digital Tonto reading list

Evolutionary psychologists like Richard Dawkins and EO Wilson also have much of value to say.

Thanks again for your comment.

- Greg

Thanks for an interesting post. Lehrer’s books is on point, but there are whole fields of knowledge about “instinctive” decision making Jonah doesn’t get to. I try to address them in a book I have coming out in March, “How Risky Is It, Really? Why Our Fears Don’t Always Match the Facts”. While it focuses on the way we make snap decisions about risk, the book touches on the kinds of decisions about ANYTHING to which your post refers. A few details follow;
First, there is the wiring of the brain. Information for external sources, or even internal thoughts and memories, goes first to an area called the thalamus, which partially processes it and sends it quickly on to other areas. One of these, right next to the thalamus, is the amygdala. This is the part of the brain where fear begins, and this wiring makes adaptive sense. We want to know as soon as possible if something could be dangerous. The amygdala gets information before the rational thinking parts of the brain even receive it! We are hard wired to fear first and think second. That makes the kind of rational decision making your post discusses kind of difficult. Even after the cognitive cortex enters the process, emotions and values still carry more weight than reason. As Joseph LeDoux, a pioneer in the neuroscience of fear, wrote in The Emotional Brain, “…the wiring of the brain at this point in our evolutionary history is such that connections from the emotional systems to the cognitive systems are stronger than connection from the cognitive systems to the emotional systems.”
Then there are the heuristics and biases, the mental shortcuts to decision making we use when we only have partial information and have to make up our minds, which is how real life usually is. this is the work of Daniel Kahneman, Amos Tversky, and many others, no sometimes referred to as behavioral economics.
Re: risk, there are a set of psychological characteristics that make something feel more or less scary, no matter what the facts say. This is why some people are still afraid the vaccines causer autism, or why many people feel safer when they are driving than whey they fly.
Finally, there is our underlying cultural views on how society should be organized. As social/tribal animals, we make decisions in ways that reinforce the beliefs of our tribe (party/religion/family/local community/nation) so our tribe’s influence rises, which helps our chances for survival.
This is all well summed up be D’Amasio in Descartes Error. He writes about Elliott, who had a brain tumor which severed the connections bweteen the cognitive prefrontal cortex and the lower limbic/emotional areas of the brain. Elliot passed all the cognitive tests with flying colors but was dysfunctional. He couldn’t make a single choice, because choosing meant putting a value on one option over another, and the values part of his brain couldn’t talk to the part that had the facts. Facts were meaningless, in the purest sense of the word.
Sorry for the longish post, but thought this might add to the conversation. I also write about this, re: risk issues, at onrisk.blogspot.com

I stand corrected. His book is on my list, so I’ll get to see for myself:-))

- Greg

I do plan to read it. I’ve taken a quick look and he uses slightly different sources than I do, so I’m sure it will be interesting.

Although, I should say that I’m always a little bit cautious with journalistic accounts. They tend to try to make everything fit the story line and you lose sense of the process of discovery and present conclusions rather than facts.

- Greg

Sorry to disappoint, but must confess that I’m completely ignorant of both technologies.

- Greg

Good post and valuable comments too.

I want to make a focus on decision making into companies : many are using BI tools (mining structured operational data) as basis to make decision, others are using CI tools (mining unstructured external data) and some are using both solutions separately.

So far, i didn’t heard about an application that combines BI & CI features with high capability to mash-up data. In others words, is it to possible to build an application that help managers make decisions based on “intelligent” mash-up of internal and external data ?

An interesting post to read about future trends of BI solutions : http://www.enterpriseirregulars.com/5706/the-top-10-trends-for-2010-in-analytics-business-intelligence-and-performance-management/

Thanks for referencing the “Digital Body Language.” I’ll try to check it out. The neurology of marketing is still relatively new and moving fast, so I’m sure new insights will be gained and the field will continue to advance.

Regarding your last comment, I would say that it’s especially marketing professionals who think advertising affects them. The seem to think that it affects everybody except them, because they are so sophisticated. It’s probably why most marketing people are so bad at their jobs.

- Greg

Woods makes an elaborate analogy between the evidence of buying stage, role, etc. that prospects leave as they wander across the Web and the perceptions we pick up in face-to-face interaction. He is of course promoting his company’s black box but he makes many provocative points. The underlying logic is very simple and basic which he reveals in his case studies, not in the elaborate rationale. These simple rules of thumb and heuristic processes he outlines in case studies are like intuitively processed body language, which is to say, close enough and quick.

How we decide is something we can all learn more about simply by becoming more aware of our own behavior. All the evidence I have seen indicates that most decisions are made on a limited set of key factors. Your fireman’s story is a great case in point: hot, unresponsive to water and too quiet –GET OUT.

I have been repeatedly shocked by young, supposedly educated adults including marketing professionals who tell me they are not influenced by advertising, only want facts, and are self-guided in their search for information.