An informed choice needs information

The ability to make informed choices in the important areas of our lives is an essential layer in the bedrock of our personal autonomy. Whenever that ability is compromised, our lives suffer accordingly. This has been at the core of almost every struggle for liberty.

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But while we often focus on the freedom -- or absence of coercion -- that allows us to express the choice, we often pay scant attention to the corollary component: the information needed to make that choice. Let's look at some of the ways in which defective information can remove the "informed" part of "informed choice," and render the term meaningless.

No information at all: This is probably the quickest way to determine whether people have made uninformed choices -- whether they had any information at all. Most often, but not always, the blame can be laid at the feet of the person making the choice. If someone doesn't ask, how can someone else inform them?

However, there are exceptions, and these would arise mostly in areas where there were some fiduciary relationship with the person making the choice and the person soliciting the choice. That would be a situation where the person soliciting the choice -- doctor, lawyer, financial consultant -- had some obligation to act in the best interest of the person making the choice, and to give them the information they needed to make it.

Not enough information: Again, this seems like a no-brainer, but we can often influence someone else's choice simply by providing insufficient information. If a person has only one side of the story, or one interpretation of the facts, then the ability to make an "informed" choice is in jeopardy.

This is a bit trickier than no information because it raises the issue of how much information is "enough." Obviously, we need to answer questions honestly, but how much information do we need to provide? Do I need to tell you that the used car I'm trying to sell is a gas hog -- unless, of course, you ask? Do I need to mention the known bugs in the software I'm trying to sell you?

I think a lot here also depends on the relationship between the parties. In some instances, we operate under "buyer beware." In others, we see a responsibility to give more information rather than less. A lot also depends on the decision maker's ability to determine the facts. You can research the facts about a particular model car you're considering buying. There is no way you can find out about bugs known only to the software maker before purchase. That changes the equation.

Too much information: I've discussed this before. One of the easiest ways to conceal the truth is to give someone too much information. If you can bog people down in a sheer volume of material and present a blizzard of facts, details, and minutiae, then you have a good chance of getting away before they realize what you're really up to.

TOS (terms of service) agreements and EULAs (end-user licensing agreements) are good examples of this. The average person -- who's not a corporate lawyer -- has neither the time nor the ability to plow through thousand of words of legal boilerplate trying to figure out what he or she is really agreeing to. I suspect some operations count on that. The problem is worsened when some companies resort to a different form of obfuscation: bait and switch.

We encounter bait and switch on almost a daily basis now. Almost every EULA or TOS agreement to which anyone subscribes has a clause that allows one party (hint: it's not you) to change the agreement at any time, often by some obscure notice that places the burden on the user to find it.

Your credit card company can change your interest rate. You can't. Your only choice: take it or leave it. An online merchant reserves the right to change its privacy policy, but you can't get your information back or get out of their database. Your only choice: learn to live with it. What's more distressing is that the merchant would claim that you freely chose to subscribe to their TOS, even though the revised version was the furthest thing from your mind.

Misleading information: Here's where the rubber meets the road! Misleading information, disseminated on purpose, is almost always designed to get the response we want through manipulation of the person making the choice. Otherwise, why do it?

Michael Bloomberg, the mayor of New York, said recently that people who suffered when the economy collapsed were the ones at fault, because they had bought overpriced stocks. As with most silly statements, there is a kernel of truth. Some people bought stocks in companies whose financial statements showed that the stock price was supported by nothing more than hype and hope.

However, an awful lot of people, as we're learning almost daily, got burned because they believed audited corporate reports that were not only cooked, but overcooked, and had been for years. The list of violators is already staggering, and it will be interesting, if we take a serious look without allowing ourselves to be distracted, to see how pervasive the rot really is.

Misleading information, however, comes in many forms, and chief among these is "deceptive truth." This occurs when the statement that the person makes is technically true, but the hearer walks away with conclusions that are wrong. In some cases, this can be attributed to the hearer's misunderstanding or making unwarranted assumptions. In other cases, far too many, the information is doled out in such a way as to be factual -- often painstakingly so -- but ultimately misleading.

Another way in which we can mislead, or attempt to mislead, is in how we frame the information we provide. Consider two statements: "Do you know that 30 percent of the people who try that fail miserably?" and "I can assure you that if you try that, you have a 70 percent chance of success."

A truly astute person knows that the statements are equivalent. However, many people do react differently to each, responding negatively to the first and positively to the second. People who try to force an answer from someone making a choice often take advantage of that psychological phenomenon.

Without sufficient reliable information, framed accurately and objectively, and without some assurance that the terms we agree to today will be in force tomorrow, our choices run the risk of not being truly informed choices. Those who claim that we have made such choices, but who have manipulated the information in such a way as to force a certain decision, are operating well outside the bounds of ethics.

If you choose, you can write to me at ethics_matters@infoworld.com or join in our Ethics Matters forum at www.infoworld.com/forums/ethics .