Drivers’ decisions under the microscope
Decisions. We make them every day. Some good, some bad.
But do you take the time to carefully analyze the situation before deciding, or do you just trust your instinct?
If you go with your gut, chances are things won’t turn out well, according to Dr. Julia Minson.
“Me and probably 99 per cent of academics who have studied it say that you shouldn’t trust your gut as much as you do,” said Minson, an assistant professor of public policy at Harvard University. “Because your gut is prone to making systematic mistakes.”
Avoiding mistakes is crucial to any Formula One team, which is why the Infiniti/Renault team has brought her on board to help recruit the best engineers possible.
Minson is in Montreal for the Canadian final of the Infiniti Engineering Academy, with the winner earning a one-year internship with Infiniti and the Renault F1 team.
“Part of the research we are doing here is understanding the ‘why’ behind it to steer people toward a little more systematic and thoughtful (approach),” she said.
Minson, a social psychologist, is researching decision science, essentially the study of how people make decisions and how they can make better decisions.
“The engineers we see here at the academy are very highly trained, obviously very intelligent people that make decisions under tight pressure and under stress based on a tremendous amount of data,” Minson said. “I think of this as relating to all kinds of professional decision-making.”
The Infiniti Engineering Academy is a microcosm of how decision-making is made in many scenarios, Minson said.
“You can see people doing it very quickly. You can see how different people approach (a problem) and the various outcomes as a result of that,” Minson said.
Renault engineers have access to reams of data when making decisions to try to shave fractions of seconds off lap times. But the drivers only have milliseconds to make decisions as they race around the track at high speed. Minson believes the work she is doing applies to both cases.
“The way I think about it is decision-making is a very broad thing that applies to all humans,” she said. “It’s not even just about driving, it’s about how do we choose which path to take. Motorsport is just one extreme example of that type of activity that people do every single day.”
For the academy competition, Minson is bringing her knowledge to the team to help better screen and select candidates.
“I am not at all a technical person, but I am really trying to zero in on how they work with each other and how they communicate and how they integrate information from other humans,” Minson said.
“One of the things we are really trying to understand is how they decide when to follow their gut, their intuitive judgment, versus following some kind of structured process.”
That is done through a series of interviews with all the candidates focusing on how they think.
“It’s been a really interesting opportunity to have access to have people that think long and hard about particular issues and how they go about solving them,” she said.
Minson added she hopes the knowledge learned from the research will lead to experiments that can further the understanding of decision science.