The single man theory

I believe the concept has to do with if you need someone to make a quick decision, don't utilize a married person. A married person becomes accustomed to never doing anything without checking with their spouse. They're not as confident of doing everything on their own as in their pre-married days -- or so the theory goes.

In the context of the movie, the single man theory involved self-destruction. If it became necessary to set off the nuclear device to prevent feared outside contamination, they did not want a person with loved-ones to return to, to make the final self-destruction decision.

I hope that's correct, and, if so, hope it helps. My confidence level on this one is about 60%.

"At a time when cynicism masquerades as sophistication, [AWTR's] theme is worth touching upon."

It's not the "single man" theory. It's the Odd Man theory, and I've personally been involved as the Odd Man in a group going over a problem.

If you notice, they pulled Hall not just because he's single, but because he's an MD. He was the alternate for another man who fit that criteria. Also, Hall knew nothing about Wildfire, and was not a part of the team that developed it. Even Dr. Leavitt was somewhat aware of the project, given her reaction when the feds showed up in her lab.

The Odd Man theory is based principally on the notion that you have to have someone on the team who's not the same as everyone else for a specific purpose. In think tanks, this means that if, say, you are talking about a space mission to Mars, let's say, you might want someone who's not an engineer in on the team because he'll think of something the other people hadn't considered because they all think relatively the same way. A way of thinking outside of the box, if you will, but more importantly to add considerations that might not cross everyone's minds.

Wildfire had the added purpose of needing someone who would make the rational decision without any bias that might interfere with that decision. In this case, Hall wasn't married and he had no family, so no concerns about that should the quarantine break and contamination occur, setting off the countdown for the bomb.

It's quite simple: they had run a bunch of decision-making tests on different groups of people, and found that the individuals in one particular group made the "right" decisions most often (> 90% of the time). The person that was given the key got it because he was an unmarried male and those performed best on average.

This is bogus of course since that is a highly unreliable method of knowing if an individual is a good decision maker. You can't use the average of a group to know if the individual is apt for the task or not... especially not since this is a unique task which means the average is a meaningless metric. It is merely a plot device for the finale.

In real life, these kinds of decisions have either been given to persons that have been individually tested and/or proved themselves through experience to have aptitude for the task, or - more commonly - been made the object of a consensus-based process, such as the Two-man Rule.

/J

It's nonsense and reality doesn't work that way.