(2005-01-18) Surowiecki Gladwell Dialog

James Surowiecki and Malcolm Gladwell are having an online dialog this week about their respective ideas. Gladwell wrote: There are two interesting implications here. The first is that you are explicitly challenging what might be called the Standard Model of Decision Making. We have an awful lot invested, as a culture, in the notion that the best results in complex environments come from centralizing authority in the hands of a single, highly expert, and deliberative individual. But that, you would argue, is wrong. We're actually better off decentralizing decision-making into the hands of the many - even if they are relatively nonexpert and even if their decision-making process is much less deliberate. This is where, I think, you and I are on the same page, because Blink is also a critique of the Standard Model. One of the key arguments in my book is that human beings think in two very different ways. Sometimes we consciously and carefully gather all facts, trationally sort through them, and draw what we take to be a rational conclusion (the Standard Model). And sometimes we reach conclusions unconsciously - our mind quickly and silently sorts through the available information and draws an immediate judgment, which may be done so quickly and so far below the level of awareness that we may have no understanding of where our conclusions came from. I call this Rapid Cognition. I think the Rapid Cognition Model needs to be taken far more seriously - that it's smarter and more sophisticated and certainly more influential than we generally give it credit it for. So, like you, I'm arguing for a broadening of our understanding of what good decision-making looks like. The difference, though, is that my critique is not focused on the shortcomings of individual decision-making. It's focused on the shortcomings of deliberate decision-making.