Hicks’s law is an understanding that has very broad appeal and usefulness in varying fields of study. Teachers and students of tactical gun fighting, commercial marketing, ad design and many others can lay legitimate claim to utilizing Hick’s Law to better assist them in their chosen field of study or work. Survival methodology is certainly no different.
Hicks law basically describes the amount of time it takes a person to make a decision and that time is increased if the number of optional answers is increased. It can be further understood by observing the following graph.
So as you can see it is rather simple in that, if you have two many options then you will need to take more time to make a proper decision. As I understand this, there are many things to consider when in any given survival situation.
By understanding Hick’s Law, you can help yourself in two very distinct ways.
The first way is to simply expand your knowledge and limit your kit. You will notice in our kit, that we have included several durable and re-usable items that can be utilized and practiced with time and time again. We have done this because of many reasons, one of which is our understanding of Hick’s Law. The more items you have, the more decision making time you will need to utilize as well. Quite simply, in most survival situations, time is of the essence, and too much time trying to determine which gear you will need is a luxury that you may not have. Therefore, train with your gear and make the response time shorter by understanding and utilizing its usefulness. This is also very true (as we alluded to in another post) because our kit items are multi-use. Consider this as you add items to your kit, to make it more useful to you.
The second way understanding Hick’s Law helps you is by understanding it from both sides of the formula. What I mean by this, is if you are presented with many options, then you MUST spend a great deal of time making a proper decision. If you happen to find yourself in a survival or urban preparedness situation, you will literally have thousands of options to take. Some of those may include sheltering-in-place, moving out, first aid needs, water purification methods, and obtaining useful food with energy. So if you are presented with this situation, you will need to take plenty of time to make a determination of how to go about taking care of yourself and those in your group. This will include a myriad of methodologies and setting of priorities. That can all be very confusing and that is why we offer all this free training on youtube as well as very well put together video on the subject.
In summary, please take away the following. In preparing and training for survival and preparedness, limit your gear options to those that have multi-use and ones that you can regularly train with. Also, please make sure you take adequate time to make a plan for survival/preparedness situations.
Written words are not enough for me to implore you to follow those two bits of advice. They are important, note them, and go do something about them, now!
