People face difficult decisions numerous times each day. Whether you are a general of an army or simply cooking dinner, the decision making process cannot be avoided. The problems associated with making decisions could be a result of obtaining too much information, as Malcolm Gladwell suggests.

On Wednesday, October 15th, Malcolm Gladwell gave a lecture on campus. Gladwell was a reporter and bureau chief for The Washington Post until 1996. Since then, Gladwell has been writing for The New Yorker. He wrote the best-selling book The Tripping Point and is ready to publish another within a year. Gladwell specializes in psychology and sociology and regularly speaks at psychological conventions.

Provost Welsh initiated the lecture by presenting Gladwell with an award from the Nassau County Executive's Office. Dr. George Stricker introduced Malcolm Gladwell and provided a brief biography of the speaker. Dr. Stricker thanked the Lindemann Lecture in Human Development for funding this lecture. With his hair that had a mind of its own, and his sharp wit and humor, Gladwell discussed the difficult nature of decision making and the role information plays into it. He argued that too much information can hinder one's ability to render sound decisions. He preached about using intuition over large loads of information. "How much information do we need in order to make a sound judgment? At times we are harmed by knowing too much," professed Gladwell.

Gladwell used the Pentagon's military war game as his chief example of this throughout the lecture. In 2002, the Pentagon spent a substantial amount of money in war games to train the U.S. military via war-like scenarios. Thousands of soldiers are divided into two teams, one is the Red Team or the enemy, who in this case was Iraq, and the other is the Blue Team or the United States military. The Red Team defeated the Blue Team within two days. The Blue Team was given inordinate amounts of information and spent too much time trying to analyze it, so that their strategy was not flexible. The commander of the Red Team was not given the same technology and intelligence as the Blue Team and used a strategy of flexibility and was able to defeat a superior force. The moral of the lesson as Gladwell states, "The Blue Team got over-complicated and was drowned in information while the Red Team was liberated from this information overload and was able to react against the Blue Team." The Blue Team struggled in their decision making and the Red Team took full advantage of this.

Gladwell suggested the Blue Team in this war training game choked. He defined this reaction as a failure resulting from a loss of contact with one's intuition and instincts. He borrowed an example from the world of sports to explain this further. Gladwell went into great detail of professional golfer Greg Norman's monumental collapse on the last 9 holes of the Masters' Tournament. Norman was on top of the golfing world and was unable to strike a golf ball that came so naturally to him for so long. Gladwell said that choking only happens to those who are good at what they do. "What is instinctive and natural for someone all of a sudden becomes complex and impossible. The brain over thinks," said Gladwell.

Gladwell also stated that the brain is divided up into two modules, a visual half and a linguistic half. He suggested people have an easier time solving problems and making decisions when the visual half of the brain is engaged. One may lose their ability to solve problems when the linguistic half of the brain is engaged. "I can turn a smart person into a dumb one by making them articulate their methods as opposed to identifying the resolution visually," he stated.

Gladwell concluded his lecture by giving a question directed to the audience. "Why do we make a fetish out of information gathering? Why is it so important to get that extra information?" Gladwell suggested that confidence plays a role in why we want to have as much information as possible and warned of its crippling effects in decision making.