Random Thoughts on Human Behaviour and Mind

[crimson]

Two people face a projection screen on which slidesd of healthy and sick cells are shown. When each slide appears, they decide whether it is sick of healthy, and they receive immediate feedback as to whether they are right or wrong. Their task is to infer rules that might discriminate healthy from sick cells. One subject, Person A, gets true feedback and learns whether he is indeed right or wrong. The other subject, Person B, is given feedback based not on his guesses, but on those of A. If A is told "right," then B is also told "right," whether B's choice was right or not. At the conclusion of the experiment, something fascinating happens when the two subjects begin to discuss the rules they inferred.

A's explanations are simple and concrete; B's are of necessity very subtle and complex -- after all, he had to form his hyphothesis on the basis of very tenuous and contradictory hunches. The amazing thing is that A does not simply shrug off B's explanations as unnecessarily complicated or even absurd, but is impressed by their sophisticated "brilliance." ... [T]he more complicated B's "delusions," the more likely they are to convince A. (P. Watzlawick (1976). How Real is Real? (page 49))

If the experiment is resumed at this point, "B shows hardly any improvement, but comparatively speaking, seems to be doing better because A, who now shares at least some of B's abstrusive ideas, performs significantly more poorly than the first time" (page 50)

from: Karl Weick (1995). Sensemaking in Organizations

[crimson]

The Westerner and the Japanese man mean something different when they talk of "making a decision." In the West, all the emphasis is on the answer to the question. Indeed, our books on decision making try to develop systematic approach to giving an answer. To the Japanese, however, the important element in decision making is defining the question. The important and crusial steps are to decide whether there is a need for a decision and what the decision is about. And it is in that step that, to the Japanese, is the essence of decision. The answer to the question (what the West considers the decision) follows from its definition. During the process that precedes the decision, no mention is made of what the answer might be. ... Thus the whole process is focused on finding what the decision is really about, not what the decision should be. (pages 466-467)

from Peter F. Drucker (1974). Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices

[crimson]

In place of the view that decisions are made as the occasions require, an alternative formulation needs to be entertaind. It consists of the possibility that the person defines retrospectively the decision that have been made. The outcome comes before the decision. In the material reported here, jurors did not actually have an understanding of the conditions that defined a correct decision until after the decision had been made. Only in retrospect did they decide what they did that made their decisions correct ones. When the outcome was in hand they went back to find the "why," the things that led up to the outcome. ... If the above description is accurate, decision making in daily life would thereby have, as a critical feature, the decision maker's task of justifying a course of action. ... [Decision making in daily life] may be much more preoccupied with the problem of assigning outcomes their legitimate history than with questions of deciding before the actual occasion of chice the conditions under which one, among a set of alternative possible courses of action, will be elected (pages 114-115)

If the interpretation makes good sense, then that's what happened (page 106)

from: Harold Garfinkel (1967) Studies in Ethnomethodology