A new study indicates that when making complex strategic decisions, having a shorter period of consideration correlates with a higher quality of decision-making. This finding comes from an international research team, including academics from Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (LMU), and the results were published in the journal PNAS.
For their investigation, the scientists analyzed 215,000 moves taken across 3,600 tournament games played by professional chess players. They measured the amount of time the players spent on their decisions and compared these results against the benchmarks established by chess computers to objectively assess the quality of the choices. The data revealed that faster decision-making was associated with a higher quality of decision, even when accounting for the inherent computational complexity of the moves and the time pressure.
According to the researchers, if a person spends a long time pondering a decision, it more likely reflects how subjectively difficult the decision feels rather than its objective difficulty. In actual testing, those who deliberate longer tended to make poorer decisions if the objective level of difficulty remained consistent. Conversely, a shorter decision time might suggest a strong level of intuition. The research team believes that this finding could be applicable to other complex decision-making situations outside the scope of chess itself.
