Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions - Book Report/Review Example

Introduction This paper shall present a summary and a critical analysis of the first three chapters of Gary Klein’s book “Sources of Power: how people make decisions.” It shall seek to evaluate the content and the substance of the text in terms of writing and techniques and the depth of his research into the different discussion topics included in this text. Background of the text The subject of this critical analysis is a book, more particularly the first three chapters of a book by Gary Klein. From his writing and from the depth of his discussion, the author seems to have a background in psychology which is basically the study of human behavior. I believe that the author has experience in counseling firefighters, paramedics, and other professionals working in emergency services. This text was conceptualized by the author on the premise that some professions are inherently exposed to situations where they have to make lightning-fast decisions. Firefighters and other emergency workers are often seen rescuing people from burning buildings and from medical emergencies. Limited studies have been undertaken on real-life situations and naturalistic decisions that human beings make. The author is intending to reach the general population with his discussion and his topic. I discerned this with his minimal use of technical medical terms. He used simple and layman’s terms to explain the procedure which he applied in his research studies. In one of his studies, he explains that “after we identified 156 decision points, we had plenty of discussion about how to categorize each, and these exchanges helped us clarify what each category meant” (Klein, 1999, p. 18). He also used words like “we” and “us” in an attempt to make the flow of his discussion more conversational and less formal. Most books and authors use the third person by using the terms “this author” or “this writer” in order to make their writing more academic and scholarly (Hartley, 2008, p. 3). Others may write without using any possessive pronouns. Such practice is also very much in accordance with academic writing and this style may not bring the message as effectively to the general population (Sammons, 1999, p. 115). He made his study more readable to the general population by making it seem like he was talking casually to the reader. This is seen in the following statement: “in one case we studied commanders who had no experience with the type of incident they faced. This helped us to see better what is required for proficient decision making” (Klein, 1999, p. 21). He made the reader, regardless of background, a participant in a “conversation” and an engaging discussion about the decision-making process. Plain English Summary of the text The first three chapters of Klein’s book talks about basically how people make decisions – more particularly, how human beings in high pressure situations make decisions. Klein (1999) noted that various books have been written trying to explain the decision-making process. These books have been focused on studying the limitations that people have – which often cause them to make “bad decisions.” Klein sought to balance the discussion on the decision-making process by highlighting the human strengths and capabilities of people which are often ignored (Klein, 1999). He studied how fire-fighters, pilots, nurses, doctors, paramedics, and military leaders made their split-second decisions. He noted how researchers assessing human behavior in a laboratory set-up shifted their work areas in the more naturalistic setting (Klein, 1999). This naturalistic setting focused on studying human behavior in the field. The author studied how people in high-pressure situations often did so well in the decision-making process, while not doing well in situations where they had time to decide and to act on their decisions (Klein, 1999). In the process of studying firefighters, the author was able to determine that human beings draw sources of power in their decision making from their intuition, mental simulation, and storytelling, not from deductive logical thinking, analysis of probabilities, or statistics (Klein, 1999). Klein also highlights the importance of experience in high-pressure situations and how the external and the larger context impacts on the kinds of decisions that people in high-pressure jobs make. The book discusses how the author was approached by military people early on, in the 1980s to make a research proposal on how people made decisions. The army noted how the policies they were implementing to their soldiers and officers were not effective tools in decreasing their turnover rates. Klein had occasion to review his proposal to the military and in retrospect he was able to determine some gaps in the proposal. For one it is not possible to place subject undergraduates in fire stations because some areas barely had fire reports. Researchers would likely not have the chance to observe people in emergency situations. Klein and his colleagues studied the decision-points of human beings in pressure situations, at what point they are likely to decide on an option, or if they have the time to deliberate the option they are choosing. The authors also noted the stories of bravery from their subjects. Stories of mistakes were also documented. Klein noted that the decision points for people did not vary with the situation they faced. Their concern was still on doing something at that particular point in time even when that decision may not have been the best one. In the process of trying to prove the hypothesis of their study, Klein and his colleagues had difficulty proving their hypothesis. However, on further analysis, they realized that people in high-pressure situations were not refusing to compare options; instead, they did not have to compare options. These highly-pressured people are capable of coming up with a good decision from the very start. In other words, even if they were placed in complex decision-making situations, they are still in a familiar experience where they still know how to react in the best possible way (Klein, 1999). Critical analysis worth Author’s individual belief The author’s individual belief, judgment, or circumstance about the issue he is discussing seems to be based on the belief that people who have more experience gain better perspectives and therefore, make better decisions. This judgment is very much based on his psychology profession and his study of human behavior. Through repetitive and through patient observations of human behavior, the author was able to conceptualize that people made better decisions when they had more experience in their tasks, especially in high-pressure situations. Missed or ignored I believe that a statistical or a numerical support for the case studies conducted and cited by the author was missed in this study. Although the author mentions and illustrates several studies to highlight the different important points he was making, he hardly presented any statistical figures to support such points or arguments. Statistics is an important tool of research because it helps lend accuracy and validity to one’s statements and claims (Ostle & Malone, 1988, p. 3) Biases There were some biases, particularly, researcher bias in this article. Since the author is a psychologist and he has carried out research on decision-making for the past few decades, there was noticeably some attempt to focus on the directions which were already taken in previous researches. I believe that this bias is present because the author has been involved in researching decision-making patterns of human beings for many years now. These are called researcher biases because the researcher may subtly affect the way the respondents would answer (Coon & Mitterer, p. 36). The author may not have intended to influence the results of the study; however, based on the analysis and the emerging trends in this study, similar patterns were apparent in the author’s succeeding analysis. Although these biases seem to be manifest in this article, attempts to decrease them were made by the author. He and his co-researchers went over the different processes and repeated them in order to ensure that different courses of action were considered in the decision points of the respondents. To further minimize biases in interpretation, the author also tape-recorded the interviews in order to give him adequate time to review the responses and to give his co-researchers an opportunity to make their own opinion about the responses of the subject-respondents. Tape-recording interviews is said to be an important way of minimizing researcher bias (Tashakkori & Teddlie, 2010, p. 751). Evidence The evidence that the author used to back up the arguments contained in the text were based on actual researches that he and his co-researchers conducted. This is in line with the so-called evidence-based practice (Sacket, 1996, p. 71). The author cites experiments and studies which they have conducted in order to evaluate trends in decision making. The author studied and observed firefighters, doctors, soldiers, rescue workers and similar individuals who were often placed in high-pressure situations and how they made their decisions during these situations. He based his research on actual observations (naturalism) (Olafson, 2001, p. 50). The author did not cite any other materials and literature to support the arguments he included in his text. The evidence he used to back up his arguments were however based on sound research with thorough applications of experimentation and analysis in human behavior. The evidence could be interpreted differently based on literature which could have been drawn from outside sources (Reynolds, 2003, p. 168). There is room for interpretation of the results from the different studies that the author conducted; these studies were based on the interpretation of one author who is a psychologist. From other fields of mental health processes, other perspectives could have been drawn for these studies (Reynolds, 2003, p. 168). Assumptions The author makes assumptions within the discussion. For one, he assumes that all human beings placed in pressure situations end up having difficulties in making sound decisions. Other assumptions were made by the author in relation to human behavior and the decision-making process in high-pressure situations. Some of these assumptions are stated clearly in the text; however, others are implied from the text of the article. One such assumption is that novices in the field often made their decisions by choosing the first option they could think of. Assumptions such as these, helped to lay out a baseline of beliefs which assisted the author in setting up the rest of his research (Burns & Grove, 2003, p. 41). Counter-arguments In the process of conducting his research studies, the author was able to unearth some counterarguments to his view. For one, the author’s belief that novices often jumped immediately into their decisions was debunked. The author was able to establish that it was actually the more experienced practitioners who often made the quick decisions when faced with pressure situations; the novices often were the ones who deliberated their options of choices before making their decisions. The author also believed that experience is important in ensuring that the right decisions were made during high-pressure situations. In the course of their research, while studying the emergency response to an exploding oil tanker, the author was able to establish that there are times when experience may be inadequate in successfully resolving high-pressure situations. In some cases, logical thinking replaces experience and can create the best decisions for emergency situations. The article was able to adequately review the different assumptions made by the author before the studies were carried out – and to refute or support their relevance to the decision-making process. Opinion This text is effective in relation to fulfilling its aims because the author was able to prove his arguments through specific research studies. The author set-out to evaluate how people made their decisions during pressure situations and the source of their power during these crucial decision points. He was able to fulfill such aims and goals by conducting actual observations on different individuals in high-pressure situations. Along with a team of researchers, they documented thoroughly how people made their decisions, what influenced their decision-making processes, and the different elements and factors affecting their choices or decision points (Hammersley, 2004, p. 154). The author was however not effective in making his study as objective as possible because he used his previous studies to support or not support his current arguments. He also did not make use of statistical figures to support his arguments and results (Wood & Kerr, 2010, p. 2002). Moreover, he did not use literature from other researches, books, or peer-reviewed journals in order to lend more credence to his results. In is important however to note that the aim of the author in evaluating human beings as they made naturalistic decisions was fulfilled because the author was able to observe his subjects in the real-time or in the actual decision-making process (Graddol & Maybin, 1994, p. 5). The study was conducted outside the safety and confines of the laboratory setting (Weiner & Craighead, 2010, p. 89). It now has become more realistic and reliable. I enjoyed this reading because it gave me a chance to learn, on a more realistic setting, how people made decisions. Many of the books I have read on the decision-making process always discussed the process in general terms and without showing any actual situations where people had to make decisions. In this book, the author presented actual scenarios which also prompted me to decide and to think about possible solutions to the issues (Lewis-Beck, Bryman, & Liao, 2004, p. 714). I found this article to be very useful because it made the decision-making process more practical. It also made the process of making emergency decisions a less fearful prospect for me (Morgan, 1997, p. 8). I always feared about being confronted with a time when I would have to make fast and correct decisions to save lives or to save my life. Through this article, I was assured that people can often make the best and the right decisions just when it is actually needed. I enjoyed this reading because it helped to reassure me that my lack of experience in high-pressure situations would not totally hinder me in making the right decisions, especially when it would matter the most. Works Cited Burns, N. & Grove, S. (2003) Understanding nursing research, Philadelphia: Saunders Elsevier Coon, D. & Mitterer, J. (2008) Introduction to Psychology: Gateways to Mind and Behavior, California: Cengage Learning Graddol, D. & Maybin, J. (1994) Researching language and literacy in social context: a reader, Philadelphia: Multilingual Matters Hammersley, M. (2004) The Dilemma of Qualitative Method: Herbert Blumer and the Chicago Tradition, New York: Routledge Hartley, J. (2008) Academic writing and publishing: a practical guide, New York: Routledge Klein, G. (1999) Sources of power: how people make decisions, Massachusetts: MIT Press Lewis-Beck, M., Bryman, A., & Liao, F. (2004) The Sage encyclopedia of social science research methods, Volume 1, California: Sage Publications Morgan, D. (1997) Focus groups as qualitative research, California: Sage Publications Olafson, F. (2001) Naturalism and the human condition: against scientism, New York: Routledge Ostle, B. & Malone, L. (1988) Statistics in research: basic concepts and techniques for research workers, Iowa: Iowa State University Press Reynolds, J. (2003) The managing care reader, New York: Routledge Sackett, D., Rosenberg, W., Gray, J., Haynes, R., & Richardson, W. (1996) Evidence based medicine: what it is and what it isn't, British Medical Journal, volume 312, p. 71 Sammon, M. (1999) The Internet writer's handbook, California: Allyn & Bacon Tashakkori, A. & Teddlie, C. (2008) Sage Handbook of Mixed Methods in Social & Behavioral Research, California: Sage Publications Weiner, I. & Craighead, E. (2004) The Corsini Encyclopedia of Psychology, Volume 1, New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons Wood, M. & Kerr, J. (2010) Basic Steps in Planning Nursing Research: From Question to Proposal, Massachusetts: Jones & Bartlett Read More