A At a course for fathers-to-be in New York, participants are introduced to baby maintenance for beginners: how to keep their babies fed, warm and clean. The City Dads Group was founded when Matt Schneider and Lance Somerfeld became fathers and discovered that people saw their place as firmly outside the home. New York was full of parents’ support groups, but nearly all were aimed at mothers. Frustrated, the friends set up their own group, which has spread to 17 cities in the USA, helping fathers who want to get involved from day one.

B In general, legal and financial support for new parents is better than it has ever been. According to the International Labour Organization (ILO), 85% of countries now provide at least 12 weeks’ maternity leave. In all but two of the 185 countries it surveys, mothers are entitled to some leave paid for by the state, companies or some combination of the two. Although only a third of countries meet the ILO’s recommended minimum of at least 14 weeks off for new mothers, paid at two-thirds of their salary and funded publicly, the picture is improving. But how many countries meet the ILO’s guidelines on paternity leave? None, because no such guidelines exist. Though it publishes detailed advice regarding female employees, the organisation has drawn up no formal recommendations on fathers’ rights and duties. Until recently, national governments have been similarly uninterested; less than half of countries offer paternity leave of any sort. Only around half a dozen offer new fathers more than a fortnight, and companies, not the state, usually foot the bill for the costs of paternity leave. In the eyes of most people, responsibility for bringing up a baby still falls squarely on the mother.

C Now a different view is slowly emerging, as growing evidence suggests that children benefit from seeing more of their fathers. But much of the demand for a shift in approaches to childcare has come from women, who have started to conclude that they are victims as well as beneficiaries of generous maternity-leave policies.

D This may appear paradoxical, as most countries have found that when they offer decent maternity leave, they increase female employment. If women have no right to take time off, or are entitled only to short or poorly paid spells of absence, many have little choice but to leave the workforce when their baby is born. If they can take a few months of paid leave before returning to their old job, they are more likely to continue working. But it turns out that long maternity breaks have unintended consequences. Time away from the labour market reduces women’s earning power, as their skills degrade and they miss chances to gain experience and win promotion. Moving into senior management becomes particularly hard, partly because of discrimination by bosses and hiring committees, who reject candidates they think may be away a lot, and partly because many high-level jobs are hard to combine with serial leave-taking. And the effect is magnified when lengthy maternity leave is combined with policies to encourage part-time work, which tempt more women back into the labour force but help keep them in junior positions.

E Rather than simply cutting maternity leave in response to such findings, a growing number of governments are trying to spread the child-rearing burden—or joy, depending on how one looks at it. Britain recently became the latest country to combine maternity and paternity leave into a single chunk of parental leave, to be split between mother and father however they see fit. Several European countries, as well as Australia and New Zealand, already have such a system. The problem is that dads tend not to take up the offer. In Austria, the Czech Republic and Poland, where all parental leave is transferable, only about 3% of dads make use of it. In Britain, the government estimates that 2–8% of dads will take more than their existing fortnight. The main reason for low take-up by fathers is financial: even before childbirth, women are paid less than men, meaning that their salaries are easier to forgo during a period of unpaid or low-paid leave. But pressure related to culture also weighs heavily. Mothers still tend to be seen as the main carers, with dads portrayed in domestic terms as blundering sidekicks or well-meaning buffoons.

F To overcome these obstacles, some countries are giving fathers a firm nudge. In a few, including Chile, Italy and Portugal, paternity leave is compulsory. Others offer incentives that are hard to turn down. Sweden grants a bonus to parents who share leave more equally. Swedish fathers now account for more than a fifth of all parental leave taken, compared with almost none when shared leave was introduced. Germany introduced the same system and saw the proportion of fathers taking time off rise from 3% in 2006 to 32% in 2013, and Poland has switched to gender-specific quotas, replacing the previous system of shared leave. Where leave is well paid and not seen as ‘belonging’ to the mother, fathers seem willing to request it. State meddling in what has historically been regarded as a natural division of labour may annoy some people. But traditional maternity leave, which channels men into breadwinning and women into child-rearing, is hardly neutral. And shared involvement by parents stands to improve women’s careers, children’s development and perhaps even dads’ life satisfaction.

A A widely recognised legend tells us that in Gordium, in what is now Turkey, in the fourth century BC an oxcart was roped to a pole with a complex knot. It was said that the first person to untie it would become the king of Asia. Unfortunately, the knot proved impossible to untie. The story continues that when confronted with this problem, rather than deliberating on how to untie the Gordian knot, Alexander, the famous ruler of the Greeks in the ancient world, simply took out his sword and cut it in two—then went on to conquer Asia. Ever since, the notion of a ‘Gordian solution’ has referred to the attractiveness of a simple answer to an otherwise intractable problem.

B Among researchers in the psychology of decision making, however, such solutions have traditionally held little appeal. In particular, the ‘conflict model’ of decision making proposed by psychologists Irving Janis and Leon Mann in their 1977 book, Decision Making, argued that a complex decision-making process is essential for guarding individuals and groups from the peril of ‘groupthink’. Decisions made without thoroughly canvassing, surveying, weighing, examining and re-examining relevant information and options would be suboptimal and often disastrous. One foreign-affairs decision made by a well-known US political leader in the 1960s is typically held up as an example of the perils of inadequate thought, whereas his successful handling of a later crisis is cited as an example of the advantages of careful deliberation. However, examination of these historical events by Peter Suedfeld, a psychologist at the University of British Columbia, and Roderick Kramer, a psychologist at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, found little difference in the two decision-making processes; both crises required and received complex consideration by the political administration, but later only the second one was deemed to be effective.

C In general, however, organisational and political science offer little evidence that complex decisions fare better than simpler ones. In fact, a growing body of work suggests that in many situations simple ‘snap’ decisions will be routinely superior to more complex ones—an idea that gained widespread public appeal with Malcolm Gladwell’s best-selling book Blink (2005).

D An article by Ap Dijksterhuis of the University of Amsterdam and his colleagues, ‘On Making the Right Choice: the Deliberation-without-attention Effect’, runs very much in the spirit of Gladwell’s influential text. Its core argument is that to be effective, conscious, or deliberative, decision making requires cognitive resources. Because increasingly complex decisions place increasing strain on those resources, the quality of our decisions declines as their complexity increases. In short, complex decisions overrun our cognitive powers. On the other hand, unconscious decision making—what the authors refer to as ‘deliberation without attention’—requires no cognitive resources, so task complexity does not affect its effectiveness. The seemingly counterintuitive conclusion is that although conscious thought enhances simple decisions, the opposite holds true for more complex decisions.

E Dijksterhuis reports four simple but elegant studies supporting this argument. In one, participants assessed the quality of four hypothetical cars by considering either four attributes, a simple task, or 12 attributes, a complex task. Among participants who considered four attributes, those who were allowed to engage in undistracted deliberative thought did better at discriminating between the best and worst cars. Those who were distracted and thus unable to deliberate had to rely on their unconscious thinking and did less well. The opposite pattern emerged when people considered 12 criteria. In this case, conscious deliberation led to inferior discrimination and poor decisions.

F In other studies, Dijksterhuis surveyed people shopping for clothes, ‘simple’ products, and furniture, ‘complex’ products. Compared with those who said they had deliberated long and hard, shoppers who bought with little conscious deliberation felt less happy with their simple clothing purchase but happier with the complex furniture purchases. Deliberation without attention actually produced better results as the decisions became more complex.

G From there, however, the researchers take a big leap. They write: ‘There is no reason to assume that the deliberation-without-attention effect does not generalise to other types of choices: political, managerial or otherwise. In such cases, it should benefit the individual to think consciously about simple matters and to delegate thinking about more complicated matters to the unconscious.’

H This radical inference contradicts standard political and managerial theory but doubtless comforts those in politics and management who always find the simple solution to the complex problem an attractive proposition. Indeed, one suspects many of our political leaders already embrace this wisdom.

I Still, it is there, in the realms of society and its governance, that the more problematic implications of deliberation without attention begin to surface. Variables that can be neatly circumscribed in decisions about shopping lose clarity in a world of group dynamics, social interaction, history and politics. Two pertinent questions arise. First, what counts as a complex decision? And second, what counts as a good outcome?

J As social psychologist Kurt Lewin (1890–1947) noted, a ‘good’ decision that nobody respects is actually bad. His classic studies of decision making showed that participating in deliberative processes makes people more likely to abide by the results. The issue here is that when political decision-makers make mistakes, it is their politics, or the relationship between their politics and our own, rather than psychology which is at fault.

K Gladwell’s book and Dijksterhuis’s paper are invaluable in pointing out the limitations of the conventional wisdom that decision quality rises with decision-making complexity. But this work still tempts us to believe that decision making is simply a matter of psychology, rather than also a question of politics, ideology and group membership. Avoiding social considerations in a search for general appeal can take us away from enlightenment rather than toward it.