The pause that refreshes ... and yields accuracy
Beyond the Blink
By FRANK PARTNOY, NYT
WHEN the Supreme Court announced its decision on the Affordable Care Act last month, the media went wild. The rush to judgment took seconds. CNN and Fox News initially described the decision incorrectly, saying five justices had struck down the law. Even after corrections, the snap analysis that followed wasn’t very helpful. The multipart decision is complex, and its ramifications will take months or even years to understand.
The blink response to this case is only the latest example of a troubling increase in the speed of our reactions. E-mail, social media and the 24-hour news cycle are informational amphetamines, a cocktail of pills that we pop at an increasingly fast pace — and that lead us to make mistaken split-second decisions. Economists label the problem “present bias”: we are vulnerable to fast, salient stimulation.
Fortunately, there is an antidote: the conscious pause. Scientists have found that although we are prone to snap overreactions, if we take a moment and think about how we are likely to react, we can reduce or even eliminate the negative effects of our quick, hard-wired responses.
For example, countless studies have shown that physicians’ immediate, unconscious reactions to racial minorities lead them to undertreat black patients. In one study published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine in 2007, researchers asked several hundred doctors about a hypothetical 50-year-old male patient who showed up with chest pain. The researchers gave the doctors a photograph of the man, randomly varying his race. Half saw him as white; half saw him as black.
(More here.)
By FRANK PARTNOY, NYT
WHEN the Supreme Court announced its decision on the Affordable Care Act last month, the media went wild. The rush to judgment took seconds. CNN and Fox News initially described the decision incorrectly, saying five justices had struck down the law. Even after corrections, the snap analysis that followed wasn’t very helpful. The multipart decision is complex, and its ramifications will take months or even years to understand.
The blink response to this case is only the latest example of a troubling increase in the speed of our reactions. E-mail, social media and the 24-hour news cycle are informational amphetamines, a cocktail of pills that we pop at an increasingly fast pace — and that lead us to make mistaken split-second decisions. Economists label the problem “present bias”: we are vulnerable to fast, salient stimulation.
Fortunately, there is an antidote: the conscious pause. Scientists have found that although we are prone to snap overreactions, if we take a moment and think about how we are likely to react, we can reduce or even eliminate the negative effects of our quick, hard-wired responses.
For example, countless studies have shown that physicians’ immediate, unconscious reactions to racial minorities lead them to undertreat black patients. In one study published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine in 2007, researchers asked several hundred doctors about a hypothetical 50-year-old male patient who showed up with chest pain. The researchers gave the doctors a photograph of the man, randomly varying his race. Half saw him as white; half saw him as black.
(More here.)
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