Why Do People Have Bounded Blindness

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It is human nature to filter the information that enters our brains. Often times it is a common oversight to miss important details that are readily available. Another pitfall is paying too much attention to irrelevant information. Chapter 4 of Bazerman and Moore’s Book (2013), Judgement in Managerial Decision Making, explains that “people have bounded awareness that prevents them from noticing or focusing on useful, observable, and relevant data. Our minds are constantly making choices about what to pay attention to and what to ignore, but our information filters make some predictable mistakes” (p. 63). To make more effective decisions a concerted effort needs to be made not to limit the analysis of the information in front of you, …show more content…

You can be looking right at something and somehow you do not see it. This causes us to completely overlook something that is in our line of vision, often times because focus is on something else. A big problem in today’s society is the bounded awareness caused by using cell phones while driving. This form of inattentional blindness is a big contributor to car accidents. Another visual form of bounded awareness is change blindness. Change blindness cause us to ignore obvious changes going on around us, often times at a cost. These assumptions can result in gradual unethical pitfalls, which are more acceptable and practically unnoticed in small doses. To counter act this form of bounded awareness, Bazerman and Moore suggest to “use the confirmation heuristic to our advantage. If we begin with the self-critical assumption that we are prone to ethical lapses, and actively searching to find them, we will be attuned to cues suggesting that our ethical standards may have slipped” (p. 67 ). It is important to recognize these shortcomings in order to avoid the consequences of hurried, misinformed, …show more content…

Focalism is our inclination to place emphasis on a certain event and a lack of emphasis on others. This attention to a “focal event” causes us to draw conclusions with just a small portion of information. This brings to mind riddles I have heard that appear to have simple answers, but are very easy to get wrong. For example; Larry’s father has five sons named Ten, Twenty, Thirty, Forty…Guess what would be the name of the fifth? Many would be inclined to continue following the pattern, and answer that the fifth son was named fifty. The correct answer is Larry! The detail in the beginning of the riddle “Larry’s father has five sons” is often overlooked and the focus is placed on the pattern of names. An effective way to counteract this is to make a more careful analysis of the question; reach outside the boundaries to come to a more fact driven analysis. Another form of focalism is affective forecasting, in which we predict how we will feel in the future based on our current emotional state. People use this form of forecasting to make many important decisions such as who to marry. The focus is on being in love and the fairytale wedding, and all of the other factors that are necessary for a successful marriage are ignored. Unfortunately this form of forecasting often leads to errors in decision making, hence the 50% rate of

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