In 2011, I participated in a pilot study examining the validity of Movement Pattern Analysis profiles in predicting decision-making patterns. Although MPA has been used by senior business teams for over 50 years, its potential application to the study of military and political leaders has barely been tapped. The pilot study was the first test of this new area of application.
Twelve military officers made up the research participant group. The research team consisted of Dr. Tim Colton, a political scientist from Harvard and Dr. Richard Rende, a psychologist from Brown, along with Movement Pattern Analysts Brenda Connors, James McBride, and myself. We interviewed the participants and constructed their profiles. Several months later, the officers completed four hypothetical decision-making tasks designed by the other members of the research team. The subjects could partially control the amount of information sought and the amount of time spent on each task before coming to a decision.
And the results? As Connors, Rende, and Colton report:
“A composite MPA indicator of how a person allocated decision-making actions and motivations to balance both Assertion (exertion of tangible movement effort on the environment to make something occur) and Perspective (through movements that support shaping in the body to perceive and create a suitable viewpoint for actions) was highly correlated with the total number of information draws and total response time – individuals high on Assertion reached for less information and had faster response times than those high on Perspective.”
In other words, the MPA profile provided valuable predictive information about individual differences in decision making!
Find out more about your own decision-making patterns in the forthcoming Introduction to Movement Pattern Analysis seminar.