More information may lead to worse decisions

Having complete information in hand prior to dealing a situation is not necessarily an effective measure of decision making. In contrast to that, this new research suggests that too much knowledge can lead people to make worse decisions, and already known facts can get in the way of choosing the best outcome.

The study led by Samantha Kleinberg, associate professor of Computer Science at Stevens, is helping reframe the idea of how we use the mountain of data extracted from artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms and how healthcare professionals and financial advisors present this new information to their patients and clients. Kleinberg and colleagues asked 4,000 participants a series of questions about topics with which they would have varying degrees of familiarity. Kleinberg and her team, including former Stevens graduate student Min Zheng and cognitive scientist Jessecae Marsh from Lehigh University, found that when people make decisions in novel scenarios, they do very well on that problem.

“People are just focusing on what’s in the problem, they are not adding in all this extra stuff,” said Kleinberg.

However, when that problem, with the same causal structure, was replaced with information about finances and retirement, for example, people became less confident in their choices and made worse decisions, suggesting that their prior knowledge got in the way of choosing the best outcome.