「釋義」

人類大腦是一個分類機器，將海量的混亂數(shù)據(jù)簡化和格式化處理，以便理解這個世界。但在商業(yè)世界中，分類思維往往會創(chuàng)造出錯覺，導致錯誤決策。

分類思維的危害體現(xiàn)在四個重要方面：臉譜化同類別下的成員，忽略彼此間的差異；夸大不同類別成員的差異；歧視、偏愛某些類別；將人為制造的類別構(gòu)架視為恒定不變。

「應用場景」

在大數(shù)據(jù)和用戶畫像時代，基于分類思維產(chǎn)生的夸大尤為令人擔憂。例如，F(xiàn)acebook根據(jù)用戶瀏覽記錄（“中立”“保守”“自由”），為其打上政治標簽，并為廣告主提供這類信息。這會讓廣告主覺得Facebook不同類型用戶間的區(qū)別比實際要大，而諷刺的是，廣告主因此為每個群體量身打造廣告內(nèi)容，反而會進一步擴大真實差異。2016年美國總統(tǒng)大選和英國脫歐政治活動中，似乎就發(fā)生了這樣的情況：Facebook為“保守派”和“自由派”用戶提供了數(shù)千條加深分裂的內(nèi)容。

Amplification due to categorical thinking is especially worrisome in today’s age of big data and customer profiling. Facebook, for example, is known to assign political labels to its users according to their browsing history (“moderate,” “conservative,” or “l(fā)iberal”) and to provide that information to advertisers. That can lead advertisers to assume that differences among Facebook’s categories of users are bigger than they actually are—which, ironically, can widen the true differences, by giving advertisers an incentive to deliver a highly tailored message to each group. That’s what seems to have happened in 2016, during the U.S. presidential election and the Brexit campaign, when Facebook fed “conservatives” and “l(fā)iberals” thousands of divisive communications.

很多公司的內(nèi)部也飽受類似的夸大效應之苦。不同部門發(fā)揮協(xié)同效應往往會給企業(yè)帶來成功。但是分類思維會讓人嚴重低估團隊跨部門合作的成效。如果你覺得公司的數(shù)據(jù)科學家很懂技術(shù)，但是對商業(yè)運作一竅不通，公司營銷經(jīng)理很懂營銷，但面對數(shù)據(jù)一籌莫展，也許你根本不會想要讓他們合作。這也是很多分析項目停擺的原因之一。

Many companies struggle internally with similar amplification dynamics. Success often hinges on creating interdepartmental synergies. But categorical thinking may cause you to seriously underestimate how well your teams can do cross-silo work together. If, say, you assume that your data scientists have lots of technical expertise but little understanding of how the business works, and that your marketing managers have the domain knowledge but can’t wrangle data, you might rarely think about having them team up. That’s one reason so many analytics initiatives fail.

以上文字選自《哈佛商業(yè)評論》中文版2019年10月刊《分類思維的危害》

巴特·德朗格（Bart de Langhe）菲利普·菲恩巴赫（Philip Fernbach）丨文

馬冰侖?丨編輯?