Why College Students Make Better Decisions Than Intelligence Agents

[The Straight Story]

Why College Students Make Better Decisions Than Intelligence Agents

Who would you trust with the lives of hundreds of people: federal intelligence agents or a bunch of college students?

At Cornell University, psychologist Valerie Reyna wanted to test whether intelligence agents were susceptible to a type of decision-making bias people accrue as they get older. It's called fuzzy thinking. As our life experience grows more robust, we tend to make decisions off of gists, rather than analytical lines of thought.

It's the paradox of real-world experience: "FTT [Fuzzy-trace theory] makes the counterintuitive prediction that reliance on gist-based thinking increases with development. That is, with increasing experience and expertise, people are less likely to engage in literal, verbatim-based analysis and more likely to use simple semantic gist in memory, judgment, and decision-making."

In simple terms, the older we get, the more likely we are to go with our gut. And, ironically, the more experience we have, the more we're prone to "to effects of meaning and context, and, hence, to gist-based illusions or biases."

But going with the gut isn't always the best way to make decisions, and we would hope that those who make the most consequential decisions—members of our intelligence community being some of them—would not be biased by their life experience and treat every decision with a hard-lined analytical thought. Right?

To test the theory, Reyna presented the intelligence agents, the college students, and a group of non-intelligence adults with a series of dilemmas to solve, involving the saving of lives. But she did something tricky—some of the questions were actually identical, but just framed in different ways.

The dilemma: There is a disease threatening 600 lives, and you have to act.

Here's an example of a question framed in the terms of saving lives:

http://www.nextgov.com/cio-briefing/2013/07/why-college-students-make-better-decisions-intelligence-agents/66287/?oref=river

[loli phabay]

1. interesting study, our experiences do colour our decisions.

In my experience you do tend to see the same patterns in intel that you have seen before, its something that as an intel officer you are coached to avoid. There are major differences in this realm when you are comparing sigint and humint, as humint you have to be more flexible and aware that people are all different.