Individual cases: what a story does not tell us about needs
One investment request may arrive with a detailed personal account, while another consists of a spreadsheet. The managerial question is how to compare their priorities without confusing one person’s visibility with the importance of the needs to be addressed.
What the literature establishes
Christopher K. Hsee and Yuval Rottenstreich (2004, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General) show experimentally that evaluations guided more by affect can be less sensitive to quantity than evaluations based more on calculation. In their tasks, the way an evaluation is elicited changes the weight given to the scale of the benefit. This does not mean that all emotion distorts judgement, but that emotional intensity does not necessarily measure the magnitude of a need.
When explaining the bias is not enough
Deborah A. Small, George Loewenstein and Paul Slovic (2007, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes) examine donations to identifiable victims and to victims presented statistically. In their experiments, making participants aware of this distinction reduces donations to the identifiable victim without increasing donations to statistical victims. Making a mechanism visible therefore does not guarantee a shift towards needs without a personal face.
The hasty conclusion
One might conclude that personal accounts should be removed from proposals and decisions based solely on numbers. These studies do not justify that rule: a story can reveal a difficulty that the available indicators fail to describe. The task is to use it to flag or explain a problem, without letting it determine the ranking on its own. (our executive and employee training programmes)
What the evidence does not allow us to transfer
These experiments concern evaluations and donations, not investment decisions in organisations in Valais. They establish neither the magnitude of the phenomenon in those organisations nor the effectiveness of any particular decision framework. The number of people affected is not a sufficient criterion either: severity, safety obligations and fairness may legitimately take precedence.
A practical check in Sion
As part of SHR’s decision-making programme, an exercise in Sion could compare anonymised proposals from hydropower, healthcare, viticulture and alpine tourism, without artificially placing sectors in competition. For each internal allocation decision, two groups would review the same information, one with the personal account first and the other with the data on the scale and severity of the need first. The measure would be the proportion of proposals whose priority ranking differs between groups, supplemented by their written reasons. Such a difference would flag sensitivity to presentation for further examination, not prove that either ranking is correct. To go further: explore the Decision-making training in Sion in the canton of Valais, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.
In pictures: Decision-making in Sion
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