A recent Harvard Business Review article titled "When to sleep on it" discusses the usefulness of deliberating a business decision. The article describes a study in which subjects were asked to make a number of decisions and each subject was given the option to decide immediately or deliberate while performing an un related task. The researchers found that subjects who answered immediately made the best decisions and that "the longer our participants thought about their answers, the more likely they were to include irrelevant information at the expense of relevant information".
The article concludes that "conscious deliberation, however long and careful can be a surprising crude and ineffective tool"
A. Is this study observational or experimental? Please describe
B. Can you think of a confounding factor here?
C. If you could re-design the study how would you do it?