#complexity #systemsthinking #heuristics #congnitivebias
Complexity Blindness
⏱️ Approx Reading Time: mins
So often in my day to day life I run into people/opinions which fall foul to the same errors. Often these concern politics, but other areas are impacted too, such as the way in which people drive their cars, the way they choose to purchase goods in the supermarket...even the supermarket they choose to shop at. It seems everywhere you look people are making decisions based on a fundamentally erroneous view of the world around them.The crooks of the issue are this, humans struggle to understand, or appreciate, the complexity of the things around them. They form a mental model of a particular issue based on a tip-of-the-iceberg understanding of the problem, and then make decisions on how to act. This often leads to decisions been made which are incorrect, sub-optimal, or just not what the person really wanted.
I spent some time thinking about this, and wondered what I could use to refer to this issue. I recall studying for my Masters degree, and in a module about systems thinking, I was presented with a concept called 'Inattention Blindness'. Immediately I make the link between the two concepts and this resulted in me beginning to refer to this problem as Complexity Blindness.
Copying from my notes on Inattention Blindness:
Inattention Blindness is a phenomenon where the a lack of visual information causes the brain to override our senses.
The concept that relativity is constructed in our brain and projected into the world around us is fundamental to this process. Our senses feed our brain with information and then our brains use their mental models to construct the world around us. This is where errors can be introduced. If we only briefly look at something, our brain will use the info it got to build the world. If reality doesn't match our previous experience we can see things that aren't there, or miss things which are.
So in the above example, when someone experiences Inattention Blindness, errors are made because their senses didn't gather enough information to form a true representation of the world infront of them. There is another level to this in that the person had mental models in their brain which were used to convert the limited information provided into a view of the world.
An example could be this, a woman walks past their dining room table every day to get to the back door, the table is kept tidy and clean. One day, in a rush to leave for an appointment, the woman walks past the table and realises they haven't picked up the car keys. They rush back, past the table, and start frantically looking for the keys, to no avail. They walk back into the kitchen to see the car keys say their in plain sight on the table...how did they miss them twice?
Well, their brain has this really good idea of what that table looks like, it's clean and tidy 99% of the time. In a rush, the eyes were darting around looking for the keys and the brain was scrambling for information to build the world view. In that moment, the brain called on a mental model of what the table looks like based on thousands of previous walks past, and just filled in the gaps, overwriting the keys! This is how the keys were missed. I can think of several examples of this right now!
So, all this is to say that Complexity Blindness is what I'm using to refer to this idea that people make decisions based on a very limited understanding of a situation. It's crucial to note that the poor understanding is rooted in an inherent inability to 'see' the complexity, not just not knowing about the complexity. An example would be how I know how complex a nuclear reactor is without actually knowing the ins and outs of how they work.
Some questions which I think can invoke Complexity Blindness:
- The Council has loads of money, why aren't they spending it on things that matter such as pot holes and doctors surgeries?
- I voted for Brexit to stop the boats. Why is UK trade lagging behind the rest of the G7?
Created by Niall Bell (niall@niallbell.com)