How to Apply Information Analysis Psychology —— Theoretical Chapter

Information is used to eliminate uncertainty. The more uncertainty can be reduced, the greater the density of information. In work, study and life, you and I always accept information, make big or small judgments based on the information, and take action. Cao believes that "as an excellent operator, you must have the wisdom to accurately judge the future direction." Pay attention to the situation around you, collect effective data and information, make correct judgments through deduction, and predict the future direction. Excellent operators are good at interpreting information from different angles, but "a lot of information exists at the macro level, so it is often ignored".

The fields that deal with information most are information analysis and library management. When information is no longer scarce, it is more important to rely on information to make decisions. The working methods of the intelligence community may bring some inspiration. What is intelligence? Intelligence is information after evaluation, and its purpose is to help decision makers make correct decisions.

Psychology of Information Analysis, regarded as the Bible of American intelligence analysis, was very enjoyable at first reading. After two years of rereading management consulting, many of the contents mentioned by the author can produce more * * *. Record one or two here, hoping to bring you inspiration.

Let me introduce the author first. In the 1970s and 1980s, Richard J. Heuer worked in the Intelligence Department of the Central Intelligence Agency. Hoie believes that "intelligence analysts should consciously pay attention to their own reasoning process. They should not only pay attention to the judgment and conclusion itself, but also pay attention to their own "how" to judge and draw conclusions.

Information is essential for making decisions and judgments, and we often attribute the reason why we can't make accurate judgments to the lack of information. Is that really the case? In fact, as long as experienced people take the information to the lowest level of judgment, collecting more information will not improve the accuracy of judgment, but will only enhance their confidence in judgment.

The influence of quantity and quality of information on judgment is far more complicated than imagined. People's judgment is not to collect all the data, but to make judgments based on several key variables passed.

Research shows that when the information increases gradually, it is beneficial to decision-making, but when the obtained information reaches a critical point, the role of information in decision-making weakens, and even information becomes harmful-information-induced anxiety. For example, at present, everyone can get countless information from various channels. If they accept everything indiscriminately, they will live in anxiety every day.

Please refer to the third part for the principles of obtaining information.

In intelligence analysis, human cognition faces three major challenges:

Information is divided into primary information and secondary information. First-hand information refers to information directly provided by information generation sources; Second-hand information is information processed from first-hand information. Subconsciously, we think that first-hand information must be more reliable than second-hand information. Actually, it's not like this. The background of information source, the motivation of information provider and the ability of information provider will all affect the quality of information. So we must learn to distinguish between first-hand information and second-hand information. You should make sure that you get all the information and double-check the information you get.

The deviation of information itself and the deviation of information readers will cause the deviation of information. For example, the pollution in the process of information transmission and the deviation between the sender and the receiver in information decoding.

So, don't flatly deny a hypothesis until it has been verified.

When faced with the situation of solving problems and making decisions, people will extract information related to the current situation from memory. Easy-to-get, vivid testimony from the heart is the most touching. This is why the traffic death rate is obviously higher than the aviation death rate, but people think that the aviation death rate is obviously higher than the traffic death rate-because the traffic death information that happened around us did not report that aviation death made people feel better.

According to the content of Beyond IQ and the course of argumentation and analysis of Qizhi School, the common cognitive biases are arranged as follows.

The core methods of information retrieval are processing accuracy and recall rate, that is, the accuracy and timeliness of information collection. These two indicators are inversely proportional, and the difficulty of information collection is the processing of these two indicators. The ultimate goal of information collection is to assist decision-making, not just to find information. We need to establish a set of information collection methods that suit us. The main principles are as follows:

For a hypothesis, we should look for evidence to prove it wrong, not evidence to support it.

Competitive hypothesis analysis requires analysts to put forward all reasonable possible answers and complete the analysis through competitive comparison among them, rather than analyzing all the possibilities one by one. Competitive hypothesis analysis includes eight steps:

Finally, the steps of intelligence analysis can be simplified into four steps: defining the purpose-collecting information-sorting out information-drawing conclusions/forming reports. This analysis method can be used as a general template for activities related to information intensity. But these four steps are too broad and need to be enriched according to the actual situation.

End.