This Arming the Donkeys is with Ido Erev who studies the impact and mental processes around ‘small’ decisions. Given that testers make tonnes of these types of decisions during the course of a testing day, knowing how you (as a human) function around them can be useful.

  • Small decisions are small, but can be consequential
  • Small is something that you have only a few seconds to think about them not impact
  • Make decision from description, overweight the safe outcome
  • Make decision from experience, overweight the risky outcome
  • Forcing people to plan about their actions removed the overweighting
  • Acting on experience often causes people to forget
  • Risky behavior is better planned out in advance
  • Realtime decision making tends to use a small mental sample side so things get omitted