I recently blogged about whether we form our opinions more from information than experience. The starting point was a passage in David McCullough‘s book The Great Bridge, and he was comparing modern Americans with our 19th-century counterparts.
I was interested not just as a historical comparison but because the information/experience question is compelling in its own right. Consider a doctor, for instance: as Jerome Groopman writes very well in How Doctors Think, the act of diagnosing a patient is a tricky blend of science (relying primarily on information) and art (relying primarily on experience).
Or pretend for a minute that you’re Manny Ramirez facing Mariano Rivera with an 0-2 count with two outs in the bottom of the ninth inning in the seventh game of the A.L. Championship Series, and you know that Rivera throws a breaking pitch away in 80 percent of such instances — but you also know that he struck you out with a high fastball last night with the same count. (What with Manny being Manny, this may not be the best example.)
But rather than my speculation, let’s hear from someone who’s done some actual research on this question.
Greg Barron, an assistant professor in negotiation, organizations, and markets at the Harvard Business School, e-mailed in response to the earlier post to share with us “what we know so far” about “my favorite topic, decisions from experience.”
Here are Barron’s summaries of two papers he has co-authored. The first, published in Psychological Science, is called “Decisions From Experience and the Effect of Rare Events in Risky Choice.”
1. Decisions made from personal experience and those made from information (what we term “description”) are qualitatively different — in particular regarding rare, but important, events that are overweighted in information-based decisions (see Prospect Theory) but underweighted in decisions from experience. For example, consider G. Gigerenzer‘s observation that more people were killed in the increase in traffic accidents after 9/11 than were killed in the attacks themselves. Risk on the road is learned from experience, and is underweighted.
2. When people have both sources of information, description and personal experience, we find behavioral inertia for whatever information was encountered first. Thus, in the 80′s people who had been practicing unsafe sex for 30 years were not as impressed by the AIDS epidemic as today’s teenagers who are scared silly (despite the rate of HIV transmission with an actual AIDS partner being as low as 1/1000). More neat applications (ex. Vioxx) are in the paper.
and 
. You can also watch it on 
The second paper is now out as well:
The effect of safe experience on a warnings’ impact: Sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll
Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes
Volume 106, Issue 2, July 2008, Pages 125-142
Maybe I’m missing the subtlety, but aren’t we just saying that both information (i.e., statistical inference) and experience (i.e., anecdotal inference) are flawed because they rely on historical data? What other data can we rely on?
I’m skeptical about the empirical result that events are overweighted by information-based inferences. If that were true, then why do we keep having financial bubbles? Isn’t the whole point of the “Black Swan” literature that we are NOT overweighting the possibility of catastrophes?
But the idea that there is some path-dependence to decisionmaking that results from exposure to either information or experience first is interesting. Maybe it could be explained also by cultural differences in the approach to data? Physical scientists are often inherently skeptical of intuitions that do not have a discernible mechanism. Sociologists are inherently skeptical of any mechanistic explanation that doesn’t explain all of the data.
familiarity breeds contempt?
This reminds me of Robert Axelrod’s The Evolution of Cooperation. What is also instructive, a la the Manny-Mario example cited above is the source of information. Manny and Mario are not trying to help each other, whereas your doctor (we assume) is.
http://blackpoliticalanalysis.blogspot.com
“People never learn from the mistakes of others and only rarely learn from their own mistakes.”
Given that this quote is true, I’d have to side with the people who think humans run their lives according to misinformation, paranoia, superstition, religious dogma, and emotion.
I’m 29, and one of those scared silly of HIV transmission. It’s hard to believe that’s an irrational fear — risk of contracting HIV must be much higher than 1/1000 in many circumstances, otherwise we wouldn’t have had the epidemic of the 90s. (After all, how long does it take for one HIV+ person to have sex with 1000 people? And after all the work, to have an expected transmission total of 1?) Besides, even if it is only 1/1000, what a high price to pay for bad luck.
Without experience, information is overwhelming. Without information, experience cannot be efficiently leveraged.
Using experience typically does not stand in contrast to using information, although we all know people to rely too heavily on one or the other.
I think the best question is how can we maximize the use of both information and experience to understand what’s going on around us and make advantageous decisions.
As Chase and Simon pointed out long ago, the expert chess player knows how to combine the information on the board with experience to succeed.
The Manny-Mario example misses the mark, because it presents only experience data. The information is in the actual pitch–and you’ve got to react pretty fast here…
Where’s George Will? Baseball and minutiae fits him to a tee. I’m sure the destruction of Yankee stadium is but a mirror of western civilization’s downfall and the stench was but a small part of the big machine’s detritus. Success smells, non?