BazermanMoore

CHAPTER
THREE
Bounded Awareness
The reason why people rely on the decision-making heuristics we discussed in Chapter
2 is that heuristics provide efficient ways to simplify complex decisions. Simplifying
complex situations is a problem that human beings must deal with from their first moments
alive. When we first encounter the big wide world as infants, we experience it, in
William James’s (1890) words, as ‘‘one great buzzing, blooming confusion’’ (p. 488).
The process of learning to navigate our way around the world—be it learning to understand
language or learning to do our jobs—is largely the process of learning what is
worth paying attention to and what we can ignore. People lack the attention and brain
power to pay attention to every potentially relevant fact or piece of information.
Some theories of decision making assume that decision makers can always ignore
extraneous information or excessive options. In reality, however, it is common for people
to find themselves overwhelmed by too much information. When people feel overwhelmed,
they often entirely avoid deciding. For instance, Iyengar and Lepper (2000)
presented grocery store shoppers with a sample of either six or twenty-four different
gourmet jams. Those who were offered the larger set were less likely to try them and
less likely to buy them. Similarly, when people are offered too many investment options
for their savings, they have more difficulty choosing and often wind up not saving at all
(Iyengar, Jiang, & Huberman, 2004).
In order to avoid the problems associated with information overload, people constantly
engage in information filtering, but much of it is carried out unconsciously and
automatically. Since people are not aware of how their minds are filtering information
for them, they often wind up ignoring or neglecting useful information. In this chapter,
we illustrate some of the ways our minds are likely to filter out key pieces of information
and we explore the consequences of this selective attention for our perceptions and our
decisions. Before reading this chapter, please respond to the problems presented in
Table 3.1.
Chapter 1 introduced the concept of bounded rationality, which describes the
fact that our thinking is limited and biased in systematic, predictable ways. These
bounds, or limitations, have focused on how people process and make decisions using
the information of which they are aware. In this chapter, we argue that people
have bounded awareness (Bazerman & Chugh, 2005) that prevents them from noticing
or focusing on useful, observable, and relevant data. Our minds are constantly
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