A recent Harvard Business Review article titled \"When to sleep on it\" discusse
ID: 3149502 • Letter: A
Question
A recent Harvard Business Review article titled "When to sleep on it" discusses the usefulness of deliberating a business decision. The article describes a study in which subjects were asked to make a number of decisions and each subject was given the option to decide immediately or deliberate while performing an un related task. The researchers found that subjects who answered immediately made the best decisions and that "the longer our participants thought about their answers, the more likely they were to include irrelevant information at the expense of relevant information".
The article concludes that "conscious deliberation, however long and careful can be a surprising crude and ineffective tool"
A. Is this study observational or experimental? Please explain
B. Can you think of a confounding factor here?
C. If you could re-design the study how would you do it?
Explanation / Answer
A) The study is an observational one, where subjects were only observed and based on data or observational output, decision has been made, without any manipulation of factors.
B) The confounding factor might be past experimence, based on which the subjects which have answered promptly, might have answered correctly also.
C) The study could have been experimental one, if the results were statistically significant. To have statistically significant result, the study should control aspect of the experiment, that one know may have an effect on the response. Then randomize subjects to treatments to even out effects that one cannot control. Replicate over as many subjects as possible.