Eyes Wide Open

How to Make Smart Decisions in a Confusing World

Noreena Hertz

• Publisher: William Collins
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780007532971
• eBook ISBN:
  9780007467112
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Notes

STEP ONE: Get to Grips with a World in Hyper-Drive

1. Douglas, K. (2011). Decision time: How subtle forces shape your choices. New Scientist, 14 Nov. 2011, 38–41. http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21228381.800-decision-time-how-subtle-forces-shape-your-choices.html.

2. A study by Cornell University researchers Brian Wansick and Jeffrey Sobal shows that 139 people underestimated the food decisions they made: ‘The average participant believed they made 14.4 food-related decisions per day. On aggregating the actual number of decisions made by the participants, they made an average of 226.7 decisions per day.’ Wansick, B. & Sobal, J. (2007). Mindless eating: the 200 daily food decisions we overlook. Environment and Behavior, 39, 1, 112.

3. Robinson, L. & Bawden, D. (2009). The dark side of information: overload, anxiety and other paradoxes and pathologies. Journal of Information Science, 35, 5. http://jis.sagepub.com/content/35/2/180.

4. Richtel, M. (2010). Attached to Technology and Paying a Price. New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/07/technology/07brain.html; Bohn, R. & Short, J.E. (2009). How much information? 2009 report on American Consumers. Global industry Information Centre, University of San Diego, California, p.12.

5. McKinsey Global Institute (2011). Big data: The next frontier for innovation, competition and productivity, June 2011, p.16, www.mckinsey.com/.../Big per cent20Data/MGI_big_data_full_report.ashx cites a series of white papers published by IDC and sponsored by EMC: The expanding digital universe (2007). The diverse and exploding digital universe (2008). As the economy contracts, the digital universe expands. (2009). The digital universe decade − Are you ready? (2010). www.emc.com/leadership/programs/digital-universe.htm.

6. Klingberg, T. (2008). The Overflowing Brain: Information Overload and the Limits of Working Memory. Trans. by Betteridge, N. Oxford University Press, Oxford, p.10. Note also that the internet is not only changing the way we find information, it might also be changing the way we think. Kassirer, J.P. (2010). Does instant access to compiled information undermine clinical cognition? The Lancet, 376, 9751, 1510–1511.

7. Miller, G. (1956). The Magical Number Seven, plus or minus two: some limits on our capacity for processing information. Psychological Review, 63, 81–97; Klingberg, T. (2008). The Overflowing Brain: Information Overload and the Limits of Working Memory. Trans. by Betteridge, N. Oxford University Press, Oxford, p.10.

8. Granka, L.A., Joachims, T. & Gay, G. (2004). Eye-tracking analysis of user behavior in WWW search. Proceedings of the 27th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on research and development in information retrieval. http://www.cs.cornell.edu/People/tj/publications/granka_etal_04a.pdf Retrieved on 26.10.06.

9. Lewis, P., Newburn, T., Taylor, M., Mcgillivray, C., Greenhill, A., Frayman, H. and Proctor, R. (2011). Reading the riots: investigating England’s summer of disorder. Reading the riots, The London School of Economics and Political Science and the Guardian, London.

10. Palme, J. (1984). You Have 134 Unread Mail! Do You Want to Read Them Now? Computer-Based Message Services, proceedings of the IFIP WG 6.5 Working Conference on Computer-Based Message Services, Nottingham, England, 1–4 May, 1984, Amsterdam; New York, 175–176.

11. Temple, K. (2011). What Happens in an Internet Minute?, Intel.com. 13 Mar. 2012. http://scoop.intel.com/what-happens-in-an-internet-minute/. This was also reported by Tsukayama, H. (2012). Intel offers snapshot of an ‘Internet minute’. Washington Post, 15 Mar. 2013. http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2013–03–15/business/37737029_1_intel-video-views-mobile-data.

12. Bohn, R. & Short, J. (2012). Measuring consumer information. International Journal of Communication, 6, 980–1000, quoted in Hudson, A. (2012). The Age of Information Overload. BBC News. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/click_online/9742180.stm. Note that the study refers to waking time in the home.

13. Conversation with colleague of Kissinger.

14. Richtel, M. (2010). Attached to Technology and Paying a Price. New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/07/technology/07brain.html.

15. Cisco Connected World Technology Report (2011). p.22. http://www.cisco.com/en/US/solutions/ns341/ns525/ns537/ns705/ns1120/CCWTR-Chapter1-Report.pdf.

16. McCafferty, J. (1998). Coping with Infoglut. CFO Magazine, Sept. 1998.

17. Iqbal, S.T. & Horvitz, E. (2007). Disruption and recovery of computing tasks: field study, analysis and directions. Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 677–686; Hemp, P. (Sept. 2009). Death by information overload. Harvard Business Review, 87, 9, 83–89. http://hbr.org/2009/09/death-by-information-overload/; Jackson, T., Dawson, R. & Wilson, D. (2001). Case study: Evaluating the use of an electronic messaging system in business. Proceedings of the Conference of Empirical Assessment Software Engineering, p.55.

18. Iqbal, S.T. & Horvitz, E. (2007). Disruption and recovery of computing tasks: field study, analysis and directions. Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 677–686.

19. Marulanda-Carter, L. & Jackson, T.W. (2012). Effects of e-mail addiction and interruptions on employees. Journal of Systems and Information Technology, 14, 1, 82–94.

20. Wilson, G. (2010). The ‘Infomania’ Study, Dr GlennWilson.com, 16 January 2010. http://www.drglennwilson.com/Infomania_experiment_for_HP.doc. Note that only a small number of people were studied in this piece of research.

21. Banbury, S. & Berry, D.C. (1998). Disruption of office-related tasks by speech and office noise. British Journal of Psychology, 89, 500.

22. Klingberg, T. (2008). The Overflowing Brain: Information Overload and the Limits of Working Memory. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp.19–20. Smith-Jackson, T.L. & Klein, K.W. (2009). Open-plan offices: Task performance and mental workload. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 29, 2, 279–289. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2008.09.002. Carr, N. (2011). The Shallows: How the Internet is Changing the Way We Think, Read and Remember. W.W. Norton, New York, pp.118–119.

23. Schumpeter (2011). Too much Information. The Economist. http://www.economist.com/node/18895468; 2008 research by the Queensland University of Technology, Oommen, V.G., Knowles, M. & Zhao, I. (2008). Should health service managers embrace open plan work environments? A review. Asia Pacific Journal of Health Management, 3 (2), pp.37–43, also linked distractions in open-plan offices and stress problems including flu and high blood pressure.

24. Richtel, M. (2010). Attached to Technology and Paying a Price. New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/07/technology/07brain.html.

25. Yahoo! & The Nielsen Company (2011). Mobile Shopping Framework: The role of mobile devices in the shopping process. http://advertising.yahoo.com/article/the-role-of-mobile-devices-in-shopping-process.html.

26. Richtel, M. (2010). Attached to Technology and Paying a Price. New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/07/technology/07brain.html.

27. Independent UK panel on breast cancer screening (2012). The benefits and harms of breast cancer screening: an independent review. The Lancet, 380, 9855, 1778–1786. http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(12)61611-0/.

28. Giles, J. (2005). Internet encyclopaedias go head to head. Nature, 438, 7070, 900–901.

29. Tetlock, P.E. (2005). Expert Political Judgement. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ.

30. See for example Groopman, J.E. (2008). How Doctors Think. Houghton Mifflin, New York, NY, p.59. On p.180 of this highly recommended book, Groopman says that in a study of radiologists, those ‘who performed poorly were not only inaccurate; they were also very confident that they were right when they were in fact wrong’. Original study cited is Potchen, E.J. (2006). Measuring observer performance in chest radiology: some experiences. Journal of the American College of Radiology, 3, 423–432.

31. See for example Greenberg, J. (1976). The role of seating position in group interaction: A review, with applications for group trainers. Group & Organization Studies, 1, 3.

32. For a discussion on the impact of visuals on decision-making see Step Three, which covers this in detail.

33. Danziger, S., Levav, J. & Avnaim-Pessoa, L. (2011). Extraneous factors in judicial decisions. PNAS, 108, 17, 6889–6892.

34. Tuk, M.A., Trampe, D. & Warlop, L. (2011). Inhibitory spillover: Increased urination urgency facilitates impulse control in unrelated domains. Psychological Science, 22, 5, 627–633.

35. As well as these books – Gladwell, M. (2007). Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking, Little, Brown, New York, NY; Thaler, R. & Sunstein, C. (2009). Nudge: Im...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• THIS DECISION WILL CHANGE YOUR LIFE
• STEP ONE: Get to Grips with a World in Hyper-Drive
• KEEP YOUR EYES WIDE OPEN
• STEP TWO: See the Tiger and the Snake
• STEP THREE: Don’t Be Scared of the Nacirema
• BECOME YOUR OWN CUSTODIAN OF TRUTH
• STEP FOUR: Ditch Deference and Challenge Experts
• STEP FIVE: Learn from Shepherds and Shop Assistants
• GO DIGITAL … WITH CAUTION
• STEP SIX: Co-Create and Listen In
• STEP SEVEN: Scrutinise Sock Puppets and Screen Your Sources
• DEVELOP YOUR SURVIVAL SKILLS
• STEP EIGHT: Overcome Your Maths Anxiety
• STEP NINE: Monitor Your Emotional Thermostat
• SHAKE THINGS UP
• STEP TEN: Embrace Dissent and Encourage Difference
• EPILOGUE
• Notes
• List of Searchable Terms
• Acknowledgements
• Praise
• About the Author
• By the Same Author
• About the Publisher