Data and instinct driven decision making

I just read a piece called We Are All Talk Radio Hosts which mentions some studies saying that the more we humans think about things, the more we make bad decisions. The rationale is that we try to come up with reasons why we like or dislike something rather than simply choosing it based on our experience. It extends to almost all of our choices from jams, to cars, to apartments.

This sort of phenomenon is why you can’t ask people what they want. They don’t know. Even if they think they know, they’ll really tell you something they don’t really want or need. In trying to come up with why they want a particular thing humans tend to introduce a lot of factors that don’t really matter to them when they come up with their reasoning. You have to instead observe them and identify problems without asking and come up with clever solutions that solve those problems. The best way to do this is by conducting experiments and collecting and analyzing data.

Human minds are irrational, emotional, and not at all designed to solve the complex rational problems that we face in the modern world. The point is that you cannot even trust yourself. You can’t trust your own thoughts, feelings, emotions, and wants. They are most likely wrong and leading you down a path that where you come up with the wrong answer or create bad solutions. Scientists know this and thus devised the scientific theory to avoid the problem of introducing personal bias.

It’s time everyone, from marketing people to web programmers used a bit more science to solve problems instead of asking people things (i.e. stop sending me those fucking surveys)