BazermanMoore

Bounded Awareness 45
Problem 6. Without lifting your pencil (or pen) from the paper, draw four (and only four)
straight lines that connect all nine dots shown here:
making choices about what to pay attention to and what to ignore, but the information
filters make some predictable mistakes. Bounded awareness often leads people
to ignore accessible, perceivable, and important information, while paying attention
to other equally accessible but irrelevant information (Bazerman & Chugh, 2005).
The availability heuristic, discussed in Chapters 1 and 2, offers some evidence for
this idea. But bounded awareness is distinct from this availability. Within specific
domains, we can identify information that is systematically left outside the awareness
of most decision makers. Because of this bounded awareness, useful information remains
out of focus for the decision maker. The misalignment between the information
needed for a good decision and the information included in awareness results in
afocusingfailure.
Perhaps the best-known problem that illustrates the concept of bounded awareness
is Problem 6 from Table 3.1. Were you able to solve the problem? Most intelligent
people fail to solve it, even those who remember seeing the problem before. Most people
attempt to apply their logical decision-making skills to the problem that is in focus:
connecting all nine dots without going outside the bounds imposed by the nine dots.
Common attempts look like the following:
People naturally create a boundary that frames the problem and constrains them
from finding a solution. But note that the problem does not tell you to keep your pencil
within the bounds imposed by the nine dots. Once people become aware of the space
outside the area bounded by the nine dots, the following solution is fairly easy to
achieve: