CONCEPT
Attentional Narrowing
The predictable cognitive response to sustained time pressure — focusing on the most salient features of a situation while peripheral information that might signal departure from the expected case goes unexamined.
Gawande's research on time-pressured medical decision-making across multiple clinical domains produced consistent findings: under pressure, practitioners narrow their attention to the most salient features of the situation, defaulting to familiar patterns and overlooking peripheral information that might prompt further investigation. The narrowing is not a failure of character. It is the cognitive system doing what evolution equipped it to do when deliberation is structurally unavailable — pattern-match on the most informative features and commit. The response is functional in the sense that it permits action rather than freezing. It is also systematically biased toward the expected outcome and against the anomalous one.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The mechanism connects to the broader research tradition on perceptual narrowing under stress, weapon-focus effects in eyewitness testimony, and the availability heuristic. Gawande's contribution was the specific application to professional decision-making in high-stakes domains and the recognition that individual exhortation to be more careful reliably fails to counteract the narrowing — the