学进去

How much time do you spend doing research before you make a decision? The answer for many of us, it turns out, is “hardly any”, even when spending a lot of money. Most people make two trips or fewer to a dealership before buying a car. We are not necessarily conserving our resources to spend them on bigger decisions either. One in five Americans spends more time planning their upcoming vacation than they do on their financial future.

To be sure, some people go over every detail exhaustively before making a choice, and it’s certainly possible to overthink things. But there are also people who are quick to jump to conclusions. This way of thinking is considered a “cognitive bias (认知偏差)”, a term psychologists use to describe a tendency toward a specific mental mistake.

In our own research, we have found that hasty judgments are often just one part of larger error-prone patterns in behavior and thinking. We’ve also found that people who tend to make such “jumps” in their reasoning may experience a wide range of costs.

To study jumping to conclusions, we worked with more than 600 people from the general population. Because much of the work on this bias comes from studies of schizophrenia (精神分裂症), we borrowed a thinking game used in that area of research.

In this game, players encountered someone who was fishing from one of two lakes: in one lake, most of the fish were red, and in the other, most were gray. The fisher would catch one fish at a time and stop only when players thought they could say which lake they were fishing in. Some players had to see many fish before making a decision. Others, the jumpers, stopped after only one or two.

We also asked participants questions to learn more about their other thinking patterns. We found that the fewer fish a player needed to see, the more errors he or she made in other beliefs, reasoning and decisions.

What our research and other recent studies show is that sometimes the most important decision can be when you choose to spend time considering before deciding. Even gathering just a little bit more evidence may help you avoid a major mistake.