Decisionscape: How Thinking Like an Artist Can Improve Our Decision-Making

by Elspeth Kirkman

“Knowingly or not, we often draw on the logic of pictorial space as a metaphor for our decisions. We use phrases like getting things in perspective or blowing them out of proportion… And we implore one another to zoom out or see the big picture.”

Elspeth Kirkman is a behavioral scientist who uses the analogy of art making to explain the psychology of decision making. “I call this mental representation the decisionscape… The central idea of this book is that we could improve our decisions, whether personal or professional, by constructing and analyzing it deliberately, just as an artist approaches the canvas.”

PART 1: Distance and Diminution

“Like the artist, we put those factors that loom largest in the foreground of our decisions… The effect of this is that the more distant something feels, the less of a bearing it will have on our decisions.”

There are four types of psychological distance—temporal, spatial, social, and hypothetical.

“Research by Nita Liberman and Yaacov Trope shows this relationship between psychological distance and detail is bound up with the concept of ‘construal level’… High-level construal allows us to think more abstractly. For example, if I am planning a party to take place in a year—in other words a temporally distant event—I might think about things like the theme, time of day, or type of venue. Low-level construal is all about the details. Once that party is a few weeks away, you know I will be stressing out about the seating arrangements, whether there will be enough food, or what the playlist should be.”

My favorite line in the book is: “It’s easier to rewire a process than a human.”

The book includes some impressive examples of managing burnout:

  • Various prompts were given 911 dispatchers to write about their work. “The stories made a difference. Resignations dropped by more than half in the group who received the emails, and they scored about eight points lower on the clinical scale that measures burnout.”
  • A group of fundraisers heard directly from people who benefitted from their work. “Fundraisers who heard the student’s testimonial almost quadrupled their fundraising.”
  • “In another study by Nicola Bellé, Italian nurses were asked to write endorsements that would be seen by colleagues for a project they were working on… assembling surgical kits… The act of self-persuasion initiated by writing the endorsement increased productivity by 15 percent while also improving accuracy 30 percent. These results were strongest for those employees who were already motivated. This suggests, fairly intuitively, that self-persuasion might work best when it requires someone to rediscover their passion for their work rather than have to generate motivation from scratch. When we find we have fallen a little out of love with something, we too can write about why we thought it was so great in the first place. It may just be enough to rekindle the flame.”

Counterintuitively, “there is ample research demonstrating that our ability to creatively problem-solve can improve when we are working on something that feels more psychologically distant. This is because we think more abstractly, freeing our minds to explore different nonobvious dimensions of a problem. When we fixate on specific details of a problem—in this case, low staff engagement—we become inflexible and incapable of creative thought.”

Part 2: Viewpoint

“We often do our best thinking when we find ways to play with our perspective, shifting our viewpoint to see how things look from different angles.”

“In China, a system called parallel projection was developed… [Objects do not] diminish in size as they stretch into the distance, making it difficult to gauge depth… Parallel projection allows the artist to capture more than a single viewer would be capable of seeing… In other words, parallel projection eschews the fixed viewpoint that defines linear perspective.”

Part 3: Composition

“Part 3 zooms way out from the bounds of the self to look at the bigger picture… This interplay between the parts and the whole relates to artistic composition… In the mind and on the canvas, the effect of the individual details work together to form the whole picture.”

“When we need to be strategic, take a long view, or be dispassionate, we will be much better equipped to do so if we are psychologically distant from factors that may have a bearing on our judgment.”

“In psychology, gestalt is the word choice to describe a situation (often an image) in which the whole is more than the sum of the parts… Back at the start of the twentieth century… the Gestalt psychologists put forward the idea that we perceive entire patterns rather than individual components and that the overall effect of the pattern can leave us with a different impression than merely taking in each of its separate elements. One of its founding figures, Kurt Koffka, asserted ‘The whole is something else than the sum of its parts,’ a phrase frequently misquoted.”

The author cites a 1980 NASA study revealing the dangerous effects of conflating the big picture and details. Pilots wore Head-Up displays that superimposed flight information over the pilot’s field of vision. “When the pilots wore them, they took more than twice as long to notice the other plane blocking the runway, and two of the pilots failed to notice entirely… They were experiencing inattentional blindness, a failure to notice an obvious but unexpected object when attention is engaged on another task… When the pilots have to physically look up and down between the instruments and the window, they automatically toggle between these two modes.” [A 1993 NASA study came to the same conclusion: “Recent models of visual information processing suggest that visual attention can be focused on either Head-Up Displays (HUD) or on the world beyond them, but not on both simultaneously.”]

Kirkman explains a phenomenon called categorical color perception. “Specifically, Greek speakers split the blue color space into two distinct pieces: ghalazio (light blue) and ble (darker blue)… The Berinmo language in Papa New Guinea, for example, lacks a distinction between green and blue, but differentiates between two colors in that region that the English language does not: nol and wor.”

“Colors, which feel so fundamental, are, at least in part, constructed by language (so much so that when Greek speakers learn to speak English and use Greek less they begin to ‘see’ colors in a way that is more consistent with the English-speaking division of the color spectrum). It isn’t just colors… We are so used to thinking in terms of the discrete categories that we are familiar with that we forget the lines between them are blurry and arbitrarily drawn.”

“This categorical thinking bleeds into every aspect of our lives. In the financial sphere, for example, because discrete dollars are considered as categories, consumers reliably judge the difference between $4.00 and $2.99 to be larger than that between $4.01 and $3.00, even though both are $1.01 apart.”

Part 4: The Frame

Diminution, viewpoint, and composition are, to some extent, within our control. “But our decisionscapes are also colored and framed by the wider social and cultural contexts within which we live… These forces curtail our decisonscapes, leading us to miss options that fall outside the frame.”

“The radical flank effect is a social psychology term that describes the phenomenon whereby a faction willing to take extreme action on an issue makes those with more moderate views look more sensible.”

“Research by Jet Sanders and Rob Jenkins… shows that our risk tolerance varies depending on the day of the week. If we are faced with choices that require us to factor in risk on Thursday, for example, we will typically choose a more cautious option than we might on a Monday… By comparing voting intentions to actual votes in Thursday elections, they show that this phenomenon can change the outcome… The temporally governed malleability of our risk appetite does raise interesting questions about when elections should be held: Should our most risk-hungry or most risk-averse self be the one invited into the voting booth?”

Decisionscape is an interesting book with practical examples of the behavioral science concepts. Topics include: availability bias, construal level, fundamental attribution error, choice architecture, choice infrastructure, gestalt, motivated reasoning, bounded rationality, bounded ethicality, bounded awareness, flow, reflective practice, premortems, burnout, expressive writing, pluralistic ignorance, intolerance of uncertainty, inattentional blindness, prototype effect, categorical color perception, collective effervescence, gaze following, the identifiable victim effect, and the radical flank effect.

It is, however, a different book than I expected based on the subtitle, “How thinking like an artist can improve decision-making.” Most of the topics covered are psychological principles which artists would not be thinking about.

Elspeth Kirkman previously co-authored Behavioral Insights with Michael Hallworth (2020).

Kirkman, Elspeth. Decisionscape: How Thinking Like an Artist Can Improve Our Decision-Making. The MIT Press, 2024. Buy from Amazon.com

Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. I received a review copy of this book.

Selected books cited:

  • Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don’t Have All the Facts by Annie Duke (2019)
  • Perform Under Pressure by Ceri Evans (2019)
  • Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman (2011)
  • The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right by Atul Gawande (2010)
  • The Secret of Our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating our Species, and Making us Smarter by Jospeh Henrich (2015)
  • Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness by Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein (2009)
  • The Time Paradox: The New Psychology of Time That Will Change Your Life by Philip Zimbardo and John Boyd (2008)
  • Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1991)

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