BazermanMoore

50 Chapter 3: Bounded Awareness
(1994) found that medical doctors, when asked to assess the probabilities of four mutually
exclusive prognoses for a patient, gave probabilities for the four prognoses that
totaled far in excess of 100 percent. The specific team or prognosis was in focus, and
the others teams and other prognoses were out of focus.
Finally, perhaps the most memorable example of focalism has been the Challenger
space shuttle disaster (see Vaughn (1996) for an excellent overall analysis of this disaster).
As many readers know, the space shuttle Challenger exploded in 1986 after being
launched at the lowest temperature in its history. The explosion was due to the failure
of the shuttle’s O-rings to seal at low temperatures. When the potential problem of low
temperatures was brought up in a prelaunch meeting, the decision makers examined
the temperatures and magnitude of O-ring problems in the seven prior launches that
had had some O-ring failure. Looking at the seven temperatures in these seven
launches showed no clear pattern regarding the O-rings, and so they made the decision
to go ahead with the launch.
Unfortunately, no one in the meeting decided to consider seventeen past launches
in which no O-ring failure had occurred. This was a critical oversight: an examination of
all twenty-four launches shows a clear connection between temperature and O-ring
failure. Indeed, a logistic regression using the full data set suggests that the Challenger
had a greater than 99 percent chance of malfunction. The failure of NASA engineers to
look outside the boundaries of the data on the table caused seven astronauts to lose
their lives and perhaps the worst setback in space program’s history. More broadly, we
argue that many decision makers and groups err by limiting their analysis to the data in
the room, rather than asking what data would best answer the question being asked. In
the Challenger case, the engineers’ failure to look for more data was probability facilitated
by the confirmation heuristic. In other words, when they wanted to know whether
O-ring failures were due to low temperatures, they looked only at launches with O-ring
failures. A full analysis, however, would have required the examination of launches with
and without O-ring problems at both low and high temperatures.
BOUNDED AWARENESS IN GROUPS
As we move from considering the role of bounded awareness in individual decision
making to its effects on groups, consider the fact that the information discussed by a
group has a key influence on any final decision (Wegner, 1986). Conversely, information
mentally considered by individual members, but not mentioned, will have little
influence on the eventual decision. Thus, while individuals’ awareness is bounded by
the information they mentally consider, the awareness of groups is bounded by the information
that becomes part of the discussion.
One of the advantages of groups over individuals is that they collectively possess
more information than does any individual member. In fact, in organizations, one of
the reasons to create groups is to pool information from different divisions (Mannix &
Neale, 2005). Thus, sharing unique information is a critical source of group potential,
both in an absolute sense and in comparison to individual decision making. Yet Stasser
and his colleagues (Stasser, 1988; Stasser & Stewart, 1992; Stasser & Titus, 1985) as
well as others (e.g., Gruenfeld, Mannix, Williams, & Neale, 1996) show a consistent