The Nobel selection committee choice of Barack Obama exemplifies characteristic human thinking errors that lead to poor decisions. This year the committee had a record 205 nominations. While we won't know for 50 years who all the people were who were nominated (the committee seals the nomination list), we do know that by rule that nominations were closed on February 1 of this year. At that time Obama had been President for exactly ten days. Recency error is the tendency to weight recent events more heavily than past prior events, even if the prior events are more important. In the past the Nobel Prize has gone to people like Mother Theresa, Nelson Mandela, Jody Williams ( a Connecticut teacher who formed an international organization to ban land mines ) and Dr. Marin Luther King. All of these people had a life time of accomplishments. But let's remember what was on everyone's mind in late January of this year. The United States had just had the most spectacular inauguration ever that was watched world wide.

Since Obama did nothing before becoming President to justify the Nobel Prize, his nominators likely thought much more about the most recent events than the life time achievements of people like Sima Samar, an Afghan doctor who repeatedly risked her life to provide basic medical service to poor Afghans or Piedad Córdoba, a Colombian lawyer who brokered the peace agreement between the Government of Colombia and the FARC guerrilla group which also lead to the guerrilla groups release of hostages.

Still, even if you attribute Obama's nomination for the award to recency error, this can not explain his selection. To understand this you have to consider the human thinking error of confirmation bias. The Nobel Committee cited "his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples." The Nobel committee members must have searched very hard to reasons to justify their prior decisions since Obama did not negotiate any major nuclear nonproliferation treaties or end any wars. His accomplishments in this area pale in comparison to past winners like Henry Kissinger and F. W. de Klerk.

Another thinking error the committee made was availability. This is the mistake of considering facts that are easy to recall and ignoring or dismissing facts that are difficult to recall. With billions of people on this planet there are tens of thousands of people who are doing truly important work to eliminate human suffering. Many of those people are toiling in relative obscurity and could use the notoriety and prize money to further humanity. Our minds naturally think about people in the news, but it is the responsibility of the committee to seek out those deserving souls that are trying to save their piece of the world and give them due consideration. The committee clearly failed to do this.

Selecting Obama demonstrates how disorganized the thinking of even very important organizations can be. Instead of relying on committee members to nominate people, the committee should adopt a much more comprehensive rules based approach which would allow people like Sima Samar and Piedad Coroba to get due consideration.