Human Decision Making. A Never-Ending Story

Too much choice? - Humans find many reasons for overthinking.

Canine leaders decide fast. Humans often don’t. Learn how you can help them B.A.R.K. away overthinking.

Woof, my fellow four-legged leaders! Let me ask you a question: How much time do you take for important decisions? Like, how to snatch the sausage off the table? Or, to bark or not bark at the mailman? As an average dog, you’ll need about 100-200 milliseconds to choose your response.

Compare this to our human companions. This morning, my two-legged assistant decided to buy me a new toy. Her last acquisition had given us many joyful minutes of play in the garden, but not classified as tooth-proof.  What I observed were the classic symptoms of overthinking:

• Hours spent searching dog toys on Amazon and various pet supply sites

• Multiple browser tabs open comparing minute details

• Endless pro/con lists

• Asking everyone's opinion (even the office plant's)

• Phrases like "Let me think about it", or "I need to sleep on it"
  (Sleeping is for napping, not decision-making!)

Overthinking – a condition exclusively found in the human species

So, what’s overthinking? The term describes excessive analysis that hinders effective decision-making. As you will have guessed, it’s a condition exclusively found in the human species. Causes are…

• Perfectionism (“I have to find the best toy ever.”)

• Fear of failure (“What if there’s a better rated, more dog-friendly, enduring, environmentally friendly, and cheaper option?”), and/or

• Information overload (“So many toys to choose from...”)

Like my furless friend. In her attempt to buy the perfect toy, she had became trapped in cycles of evaluating options. Trying to process too much information produced cognitive overload: feelings of stress and anxiety, with notable adverse impact on her working memory and decision-making capacity. Simply put: Her big brain kept generating "what-if" scenarios until her thoughts were more tangled than my leash after chasing a squirrel.

Dogs are natural decision makers

As superior species, us dogs are strangers to such dilemmas. We use what Gary Klein calls “Natural Decision Making”. Klein is a psychologist who spent nearly 50 years researching how experts make decisions. Whilst his work focused on humans operating in high-stakes, time-pressured contexts (like firefighting or the military), the way he found these experts make decisions is pretty similar to us making decisions all the time.

According to Klein and his colleagues, experts make fast, recognition primed decisions. This is how it works:

• Pattern repertoire building: Through repeated exposure to similar situations, experts build a mental library of patterns, or “situation prototypes”.

• Experience-driven pattern recognition: When deciding the appropriate course of action in a given situation, experts don’t consider all details. Instead, they focus on a few cues only to identify a pattern. This helps them to quickly match current circumstances to past experiences, even if context or single aspects differ.

• Mental simulation: They then choose a response option they used in their experience (whatever comes to mind first), and mentally simulate if the same approach would work in the current situation.

• Application of the 1st workable response option: If it does, they apply it. If there’s shortcomings, they modify the approach and apply it. Only if an option cannot be easily modified, they would think of another option and repeat the above process.

Fun fact: When asked about their decision-making process, many of these folks would claim it was “intuition”.

Let’s compare this to how a smart dog would take decisions. I’ll use a personal example.

As expert under-the-table observer, I have encountered countless opportunities to savor an additional meal. Just yesterday, one of my human co-habitants left a cheese sandwich unattended on the dining table.

• I immediately knew what to do. On past occasions, I have climbed onto a chair to access the table top and enjoy a lunch with a view.

• Within split seconds, I assessed if the approach would work in the given situation. It needed minor modifications, because the two-legged housemate might soon return from the kitchen.

• I climbed the chair to reach the table top with my front paws, then kicked down the plate with the sandwich. Plates fall off tables, even without canine intervention! And given that humans detest licking cheese from the floor, me eating the sandwich was now being helpful.

No comparing of different options, no overthinking, but fast action and reliance on past experience.

How to help humans - The B.A.R.K. Decision-Making Tool

It’s clear that our human friends need help to prevent overthinking. After careful consideration (approximately 3 minutes), I've come up with an easy-to-remember tool to help humans speed up their decision-making: B.A.R.K.

**B**ank on familiar patterns and gut feeling.

**A**pply the 1st workable option (create facts not what-ifs)

**R**eact decisively (Make the choice - no dilly-dallying!)

**K**eep moving forward (Learn and bound ahead to the next adventure.)

The beauty of the B.A.R.K. tool? Once your human remembers the acronym, a quick bark will suffice as reminder, and get them out of analysis paralysis.

Now, you might wonder what happened to my assistant and her endless quest to buy a new toy. Luckily, I had previously introduced her to the B.A.R.K. tool. After my morning nap, I barked to remind her. She looked up (or, rather down…) from her PC. I barked again, and gleamed at the screen. “Okay, you’re right.”, she said and went back to the 1st tab she had opened hours ago. There she bought the identical toy I had just scrunched, but this time she ordered a 2nd one as backup.

And while my new toy was being prepared for shipment, we could re-focus on the present, and the real purpose of human-dog cooperation: enjoying life together.

So what?

Overthinking is a condition, exclusively found in the human species. The B.A.R.K. tool can help your humans spend less time on simple decisions.

Beyond that, remind our large-brained companions that…

• Perfect is the enemy of done:
  While you're analyzing 50 shades of beige for the office walls, opportunities are passing by faster than a cat I'm chasing.

• Sometimes it’s okay to trust your instincts:
  “Intuitive judgments often arise from genuine skill (…)”[i]

• Just let the ball drop:
  You picked the squeaky toy that stops squeaking after day one? It's not the end of the world! Learn and move on.

• Take thinking breaks:
  When you notice you’re overthinking: take a walk. Preferably with the nearest available dachshund.

[i] Daniel Kahnemann & Gary Klein, Conditions for Intuitive Expertise. – A Failure to Disagree, American Psychologist, September 2009