Bounded Awareness

heuristics provide efficient ways to simplify complex decisions. The process of learning to
navigate our way around the world—be it learning to understand language or learning to do our
jobs is largely the process of learning what is worth paying attention to and what we can ignore.
People lack the attention and brain power to pay attention to every potentially relevant fact or
piece of information. Some theories of decision making assume that decision makers can always
ignore extraneous information or excessive options. In reality, however, it is common for people
to find themselves overwhelmed by too much information. When people feel over-whelmed,
they often entirely avoid deciding

. In order to avoid the problems associated with information overload, people constantly engage
in information filtering, but much of it is carried out unconsciously and automatically. Since
people are not aware of how their minds are filtering information for them, they often wind up
ignoring or neglecting useful information. It is illustrated some of the ways our minds are likely
to filter out key pieces of information and we explore the consequences of this selective attention
for our perceptions and our decisions. The concept of bounded rationality, which describes the
fact that our thinking is limited and biased in systematic, predictable ways. Thes ebounds, or
limitations, have focused on how people process and make decisions using the information of
which they are aware. In this chapter, we argue that people have bounded awareness (Bazerman
& Chugh, 2005) that prevents them from noticing or focusing on useful, observable, and relevant
data.

Without lifting your pencil (or pen) from the paper, draw four (and only four).straight lines that
connect all nine dots shown here:

Bounded awareness often leads people to ignore accessible, perceivable, and important
information, while paying attention to other equally accessible but irrelevant informationof this
bounded awareness, useful information remains out of focus for the decision maker. The
misalignment between the information needed for a good decision and the information included
in awareness results in a focusing failure. However, bright people can look at this problem for
hours and not solve it. Why? Because bounds created by our minds eliminate the solution.
Creativity problems frequently make people feel tricked. A common‘‘trick’’ of such problems is
to misdirect our attention by causing us to psychological see bounds on the problem. These
bounds prevent discovery of the solution. After the teacher breaks the

psychological bound, the solution seems obvious. The most critical barriers to creative decisions
are our assumptions, or the information we allow into the defined problem space.

INATTENTIONAL BLINDNESS

Asked people to watch a video of two visually superimposed groups of players passing
basketballs. One group wore white shirts and the other group wore dark shirts. Participants were
instructed to count the number of passes made between members of one of the two groups. The
superimposed video made the task moderately difficult, and participants had to give it their full
attention.

The interesting result is that only 21 percent of Neisser’s participants reported seeing a woman
who clearly and unexpectedly walked through the basketball court carrying an open umbrella.
Our repeated experience, using this video in the classroom, is that far fewer than 21 percent of
our students notice the woman. After showing the video the first time, we ask our students
whether anyone saw anything unusual. In a large room, it is common for just a few people to
mention seeing a woman with an umbrella. When they offer this observation, the others in the
room scoff at it. Yet, when we show the video again to demonstrate what most of the class
missed, everyone sees the woman. By focusing on one task—in this case, counting passes people
miss very obvious information in their visual. We find the failure to see the obvious (including
our own failure the first time we saw the video) amazing because it violates common
assumptions about our visual awareness. This phenomenon has captured the interest of cognitive
and perceptual psychologists, and has become known as in-attentional blindness.

CHANGE BLINDNESS

Some of the most surprising studies of change blindness examine visual perception. Change
detection researchers have provided evidence that, in a surprisingly large number of cases,
people fail to notice visual changes in their physical environments. We predict that you are much
more likely to notice and refuse to sign the statements if the ethical lapse occurs abruptly from
one year to the next. This prediction is based on the notion of a ‘‘slippery slope’’ of unethical
behavior. According to the slippery slope theory, one tiny step away from high ethical standards
puts a corporation on a slippery slope downward into larger ethical lapses. But such lapses are
more likely to occur through tiny slips the in one fell swoop. When our behavior becomes
unethical one step at a time, we are less likely to notice what we are getting ourselves into and
more likely to be able to justify the behavior than if we abruptly drop our ethical standards .In
this sense, ethical degradation is like boiling frogs: Folk wisdom says that if you throw a frog in
boiling water, it. It will jump out. But if you put a frog in nice warm water and slowly raise the
temperature, by the time the frog realizes the water has become too hot, it will already be
cooked. Studies of ethical decision making confirm that people are more willing to accept ethical
lapses when they occur in several small steps than when they occur in one large step.

Michael Sandel 3: Why we shouldn't trust markets with our civic life　(transcript)
Summary
this is the problem like happening in Japan right now and I've just read a similar article. In Japan, there is
unconscious discrimination. It is because Japanese people don't have backgrounds living and talking with
different races. Japanese society hasn't accepted in immigrants and even refugees. Japanese
government thinks that the main of markets is an economy and it is not important how people live if the
economy grows better. However, it loses a lot of important things.
The speaker tells us that our market has been changed to market societies from a market economy. A
market economy is a tool, a valuable and effective tool, for organizing productive activities, but market
societies is a place where almost everything is up for sale. It is every aspect of life which includes
personal relations, social practices, family life, health, education, politics, and law.
Economists assume that markets don't touch or taint the goods when they exchange them. It means not
to change the meaning and the value of the goods for exchange though it can't use for our market
society. It is because our market society includes personal relations, education, and other important
meanings, and they shouldn't be changed by money or exchanging them with money.
It creates inequality but it makes us worry without realizing.  Thus we shouldn't trust markets.
There should be certain moral and civic goods that markets do not honor and money cannot buy for our
place where people of different social backgrounds and different walks of life can encounter one
another ordinarily.It teaches us to overcome our differences and to live happily