Chapter 3: Recognition Primed Decision Making Process

Question 1

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What is recognition primed decision making also called?

Answer 1

RPD or RPDM

Question 2

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Who discovered recognition primed decision making?
And what research was based off of?

Answer 2

Gary Klein a cognitive decision researcher developed RPD while conducting a study with firefighters in the 1980s (in lieu of soldiers for the army, looking high stress decision making).

Question 3

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Why did Klein use firefighters as the subjects of the study?

Answer 3

Because they knew the best way to understand the complexities and challenges of decision-making under stress would be to observe decision-makers under the natural environment. However watching battlefield commanders in their natural environment is impractical, that’s how the fire service came to be the subjects of the study.

Question 4

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Klein’s theorized that fire ground commanders would use the traditional decision-making model but were shocked to learn…

Answer 4

The way fireground commanders made decisions didn’t fit the standard definition of the decision (a choice between two or more alternatives).

Instead they gathered a small amount of information quickly processed what it meant and then came up with the solution, and visualized an action plan to see if would work out (mental modeling). If the mental modeling was acceptable plan was put into action. If the mental model not work, the commander scrapped the plan and modeled out an entirely new plan.

Question 5

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What was the big surprise from Kline’s group about how firefighters are making decisions?

Answer 5

A decision was always thought to be a choice between two or more alternatives, but Klein discovered that was not how fire ground commanders were making decisions.

Question 6

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For commanders to successfully use recognition primed decision making, what do they need?

Answer 6

They must have a level of experience to draw upon.

Question 7

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What is the facet that separates first responder decision environments from others?

Answer 7

How dramatically changing the environment is, coupled with the compression of time and the need to make rapid decisions.

Question 8

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Fire ground commanders must size up the situation quickly and make a decision often in less than a minute.

What makes it extremely difficult if not impossible to take more time in making such an important decision?

Answer 8

The incident conditions change so rapidly that information gathered five minutes ago but have degraded in the assumptions made on that information would no longer be valid.

Question 9

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What is it that experts are able to do that novices in decision-making can’t?

Answer 9

Experts can quickly assemble groupings of clues and cues, mentally package them together, and determine the meaning of the packaged information.

Question 10

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Why is it that novices struggle decision-making ?

Answer 10

Novices struggled with the task of fitting pieces of information together to form a big picture perspective what’s going on. Their attention can be drawn to what appears to be important things, and that can completely miss a lot of smaller clues and cues, that alone may not mean much individually, but collectively commune a lot.

Question 11

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What is a negative clue/cue

Answer 11

Experts possess the ability to be able to size up the situation and comprehend the meaning of clues and cues that are absent, but should be there. The absence of certain clues and cues are critically important as the presence of others. Novices lack experience and therefore are not able to comprehend the meaning of what is missing.

Question 12

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Why is it problematic when novice commanders observe their experience counterparts conducting rapid size ups followed by rapid actions and think they can do the same thing?

Answer 12

Because the novice is not likely to understand what the experienced commander is doing mentally and those first few seconds. When novices conduct rapid size ups and take quick actions the risk associated with those decisions increases dramatically. Novices don’t even know what they don’t know.

Question 13

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What is the impact of stress on the process of making good decisions?

Answer 13

Stress contributes distinct, identifiable, and measurable physical, mental, and emotional changes including increasing blood pressure, pulse and respirations, heart palpitations, profusely sweating, dry mouth, trembling, narrowing of attention, and hyper awareness to name a few.

Question 14

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What is the name of the organ that triggers stress reactions?

Answer 14

The hypothalamus

Question 15

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When a stress reaction is triggered hypothalamus call causes your endocrine system to release, what chemicals?
_

Answer 15

Adrenaline-to prepare your body for action
Glucose-to give you energy
Endorphins (endogenous morphine)- to mask pain & stimulant
Cortisol- to help counter the effects of adrenaline

Question 16

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One of the ways that you can avoid or minimize the stress reaction?

Answer 16

Learning how to remain calm under stress and then practicing the techniques that work for you can reduce the release of chemicals and help you maintain control of your reactions. Stress calming techniques like control breathing, experience – the more often you’re exposed to a stressful event more likely you are to develop an immunity to that stress

Question 17

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What are some of the physiological changes from stress?

Answer 17

Chemicals released under stress because the heart, lungs, brain, and muscles to kick in high gear to provide extra blood/oxygenation and nutrients to handle the stress event.

Reduced blood supply to kidneys and digestive track.

Loss of bowel or bladder control is possible too (extreme stress)

Question 18

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What is the impact of stress on decision-making

Answer 18

Your natural, rational, analytical judgments system does not function the same way under stress. As stress levels increase in your body triggers the psychological reactions it becomes more difficult to comprehend complex and detailed information. You may even struggle to understand things that under normal stress levels you would find easy to comprehend.

You get stress stupid

Question 19

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Stress drives a person to use a primitive instinct driven form of decision-making…

Answer 19

Intuition, primal decision process that uses subconsciously stored training and experiences supported by prewired evolutionary programming in your brain.

Question 20

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What is the term used to often describe the reaction to stress?

Answer 20

Fight or flight

Question 21

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Which form of decision-making yields better results?

Answer 21

A number of studies have indicated that rational decision process yields no better outcomes than decisions based on intuition.

Question 22

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Neuroscience term for short-term memory

Answer 22

Working memory-it holds things that you’re thinking about or working on in the current time. It’s hard horribly vulnerable to degradation if the data is not quickly passed along to the long-term memory stores.

Question 23

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What happens when the capacity of your brain short-term memory is exceeded?

Answer 23

When the information coming in exceeds your brain’s capacity to process it, your ability to make decisions may slow, sputter (skip and hop around), or your brain may just freeze up.

Question 24

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What’s the key difference between the way a computer works in the way our brain works?

Answer 24

If your computer is running low on memory you can start to close save what you want and then close programs. But our brain is not like that, research has proven that much of what we see, taste, touch, and smell is captured and stored in memory. But we don’t get to decide what’s kept and what is thrown out. Or how easy it is to recall if needed.

Question 25

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What is the capacity of the human brain to store information?

Answer 25

Neuroscience predicted the capacity of the brain is greater then all the information currently residing on the Internet.

Question 26

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How are memories stored in your brain?

Answer 26

Different stimuli are stored in different places across the cerebral cortex.

Question 27

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How do we lose memories?

Answer 27

Some neuroscientists suggest the only way to lose information stored in the brain is to suffer brain damage, either from an injury, or disease that alters or destroys brain function. Brains can also deploy coping mechanisms to suppress traumatic memories.

Question 28

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What contributes to being able to recall memories you have experienced?

Answer 28

The regular and routine events of daily life are stored in files that are not given the same prominence, thus not as recallable.

Question 29

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How does intuitive problem-solving occur?

Answer 29

In stressful situations, especially time compressed, the intuitive decision-making process searches through collections of experiences looking for the solution for the problem in a very fast manner.

Question 30

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What is the hunch or gut feeling actually mean?

Answer 30

Your brain was able to locate a similar experience on how to deal with the present situation.

Question 31

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What is tactic knowledge

Answer 31

Tactic knowledge resides in your subconscious that is difficult to explain how or where you acquired it. One of the reasons you may not be able to explain how you acquired this knowledge is since the information is based on is in part of your subconscious brain place there without your awareness. Your brain stores nearly everything.

Question 32

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What happens if you don’t have a gut feeling about a situation?

Answer 32

No match you have no previous experience or training related to the situation being faced.

Question 33

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What causes an intuitive gut feeling?

Answer 33

Whether it’s from one experience or variety of experience combined in your brain identifies the solution it creates a pattern match. The pattern match is what causes the intuitive gut feeling.

Question 34

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Why is it important to verify that feeling with the facts that validate your intuition?

Answer 34

While intuitive gut feeling can guided decision making, the brain is not infallible it’s important to verify your gut feelings with facts that validate your intuition.

Question 35

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What is the fallacy of intuition based decision-making?

Answer 35

When assessing the situation, capturing clues and cues, forming a pattern match, and getting an intuitive gut feeling, builds confidence. As you search for additional facts to validate your intuition if you only look for clues and cues that affirm your intuition and disregard clues that may refute your intuition you are falling into confirmation bias.

Question 36

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Confirmation bias

Answer 36

Only looking for evidence that supports your thinking, dismissing other evidence.

Question 37

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the author argues that in near-death experiences where subjects have their life flash before their eyes is actually…

Answer 37

The brain searching through life experiences desperately trying to find a pattern match that would give an intuitive gut feeling about how to survive the near-death experience. The images flashing through the subjects mind are stored visual images rising from the subconscious level of his brain to the conscious level.

Question 38

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when our brain stores and memory how is that memory actually stored?

Answer 38

The brain does not store complete experiences as packaged images or scenes. Instead it stores the various stimuli in separate regions of the brain. Vision is stored in one place, sound and another, etc. when recalling that memory the brain reassembles the experience into coherent memory.

Question 39

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Chunking

Answer 39

Where individual pieces of information are not significant until coupled with five or six other pieces. Then and only then is the meaning significant. The same as being able to read words where the only the first and last letters are in the correct spot.

Question 40

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why should you not dismiss a gut feeling?

Answer 40

That intuition is tactic knowledge which found a match for a subconscious experience

Question 41

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you are not infallible, and neither is your brain just because you get a gut feeling doesn’t mean that tactic knowledge will have the correct answer. How do you increase your chances of making a good decision?

Answer 41

When you get that intuitive gut feeling remember to look for some corroborating facts to validate your decision.

But also look for facts that refute your findings, don’t fall into confirmation bias. Also there’s lots we learned in negative feedback.

Question 42

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analysis paralysis

Answer 42

Struggling with knowing how much factual information to gather to confirm they are making a good decision and consequently delay their decision or make no decision at all.

Question 43

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What is the risk, with first responders, if you are unable or unwilling to make a decision because of incomplete information?

Answer 43

There is a risk the responders may grow impatient and engage in independent goalsetting – freelancing

Question 44

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What is the 30 to 70% rule?

Answer 44

A good rule of thumb depending upon the emergency might be to gather 30 to 70% solid information to validate your intuition and then make a decision and go with it.

Question 45

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To be able to make good recognition primed decision a decision-maker needs the following four essential skills.

Answer 45

1. Situational awareness
2. Tactic knowledge
3. Mental modeling
4. Self-confidence

Question 46

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RDP requirement 1: Situational awareness

Answer 46

A simplistic definition of situational awareness is paying attention. There are dozens of formidable barriers that challenge the decision-makers situational awareness.

Question 47

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RDP requirement 2: Tactic knowledge

Answer 47

The unconscious knowledge experts possess from years of collective training and experience. This knowledge resides mostly in the subconscious memory stores.

Question 48

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RDP requirement 3: Mental modeling

Answer 48

To make good recognition primed decisions the decision-maker must have the ability to developmental models. Mental modeling occurs when the decision-maker takes what’s happening at the current moment on the emergency scene and draw upon training and experience to visualize a plan of action. Mental modeling is making predictions of the future.

Question 49

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What makes mental modeling so important?

Answer 49

The reason this is so important is accurate mental modeling can foretell potential bad things well before they actually happen. When a decision-maker develops a mental model that results in a bad intuitive gut feeling that strong indication their is a significant cause for concern.

Question 50

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How can a mental model help establish benchmarks?

Answer 50

As a decision-maker plays a proverbial mental movie forward certain events are naturally anticipated those events become benchmarks.

Question 51

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What is a way a decision-maker can get into trouble with mental modeling?

Answer 51

Failing to appreciate how important mental modeling is, and failing to take the time to play the mental movie forward and think about what’s going to happen at the emergency scene in the next 10 to 20 minutes. A commander who only thinks about the current moment is asking for trouble.

Question 52

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RDP requirement 4: Self-Confidence

Answer 52

Self efficacy decision-maker must be willing to trust his or her intuition, and that trust comes in part from understanding the origins of the intuition.

Decision-maker who tries to make rational sense out of that feelings can quickly dismiss the feeling because they are not overtly, measurable evidence that anything can be wrong. Be careful about allowing rational logical thinking to overrule concerns sparked by intuition.