Sunday, September 30, 2012

BBC Documentary - How to Make Better Decisions


I found this at Open Culture - it's a great little documentary from BBC Horizon. The producers take a look inside the world of cognitive science to discovery how make decisions, and how we might do that better if understand how the brain works.



How to Make Better Decisions, a Thought-Provoking Documentary by the BBC

September 28th, 2012

This is the summary from Open Culture's post, and below is the one from the web site.
“In this program,” says narrator Peter Capaldi at the outset, “we’re going to show you how to be more rational, and deal with some of life’s biggest decisions.” It’s a pretty big claim, and you may doubt that it’s true (especially during the silly opening scene involving a group of nerds trying to score a date) but give this 2008 BBC Horizon program a little time and you might come away with a few things to think about. How to Make Better Decisions takes us inside cognitive science laboratories and out on the streets to demonstrate how the emotional part of our brain gets the better of the rational part. The film introduces a number of intriguing concepts, including Prospect Theory“the framing effect,” and “priming.” More controversially, it highlights some research that suggests the possibility that our intuition may have something to do with an ability to sense future events. How to Make Better Decisions is 49 minutes long, and we’ve decided to add it to our growing collection of Free Movies Online.

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This is the description with the video at YouTube.
According to science: We are bad at making decisions. Our decisions are based on oversimplification, laziness and prejudice. And that's assuming that we haven't already been hijacked by our surroundings or led astray by our subconscious!

Featuring exclusive footage of experiments that show how our choices can be confounded by temperature, warped by post-rationalisation and even manipulated by the future, Horizon presents a guide to better decision making, and introduces you to Mathematician Garth Sundem, who is convinced that conclusions can best be reached using simple maths and a pencil!

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