Three keys to making good decisions

The World Health Organ­i­sa­tion (WHO) recent­ly list­ed know­ing how to make deci­sions as one of the ten psy­choso­cial skills required to respond effec­tive­ly to the demands and chal­lenges of mod­ern dai­ly life. Clas­si­cal­ly, neu­ro­science dis­tin­guish­es three stages in deci­sion mak­ing¹: def­i­n­i­tion of pref­er­ences, exe­cu­tion and obser­va­tion of an action and final­ly expe­ri­ence of the result. Here, I offer some of the pit­falls with­in each of these stages and offer sug­ges­tions of how to over­come them by look­ing at three major psy­cho­log­i­cal duels.

“Am making the right decision?”

The process of ‘decid­ing’ con­sists of man­ag­ing the con­flict that occurs between the two speeds at which our thoughts occur. ‘Sys­tem 1’ is rapid, low effort, intu­itive and heuris­tic, com­pared to sys­tem 2 that is slow, sys­tem­at­ic, log­i­cal, and delib­er­ate². Both have their advan­tages (speed, ease, reli­a­bil­i­ty, rel­e­vance) and dis­ad­van­tages (bias, noise, cost, fatigue), which are the source of much sci­en­tif­ic debate. Nonethe­less, the key to man­ag­ing this duel is found in process of inhi­bi­tion³; in oth­er words, suc­ceed­ing (when nec­es­sary) in sus­pend­ing hasty judge­ment, ready-made rou­tines, con­sen­su­al stereo­types and cog­ni­tive bias­es – in oth­er words, know­ing when not to act.

Of course, it is more dif­fi­cult to inhib­it rou­tines than it is fol­low pre-learned pat­terns because it requires new infor­ma­tion to be learned and prac­tised. As such, apply­ing strict selec­tiv­i­ty to a deci­sion con­sists of mea­sur­ing and weigh­ing up the duel between the two speeds of the mind that dri­ve our choic­es⁴⁵, know­ing that some­times intu­itive deci­sions may, in fact, prove to be more effec­tive⁶.

“Did I do the right thing?”

The greater the invest­ment in time, ener­gy, or resources (human, finan­cial, etc.), the stronger the will to legit­imise the deci­sion tak­en. But how far can we per­se­vere to the point of no longer being objec­tive, no longer see­ing the facts or hear­ing the argu­ments that clear­ly call into ques­tion the deci­sion we made? While it is good and social­ly val­ued to be per­sis­tent, it is impor­tant to iden­ti­fy the almost obses­sive pur­suit of an action against all objec­tive rea­son⁸⁹.

Once the deci­sion has been made, the implaca­ble log­ic of ‘sunk costs’ sets in, with its share of well-known cog­ni­tive bias­es that are hard to shake off: hypoth­e­sis con­fir­ma­tion (I look for argu­ments that con­firm my deci­sion and only those argu­ments), sta­tus quo (if there is no rea­son to change, then why change?), loss aver­sion (to risk los­ing because of a change is psy­cho­log­i­cal­ly unbear­able).

It is dif­fi­cult to fight against this dilem­ma alone since we are often only dim­ly aware of our own cog­ni­tive bias­es. Hence, tak­ing coun­ter­mea­sures can make it pos­si­ble to avoid these traps before­hand. For exam­ple, ensur­ing that the peo­ple who make deci­sions are not the same as those who eval­u­ate the effects and there­fore the con­tin­u­a­tion of the deci­sion tak­en. This is why, for exam­ple, new pres­i­dents who come to pow­er can more eas­i­ly stop process­es that were start­ed 20 years ago and which every­one knew were ineffective…

“Was I right?”

Our minds are par­tic­u­lar­ly adept at recon­struct­ing past sequences by attribut­ing inter­nal caus­es (skill, effort) to our suc­cess­es and exter­nal caus­es (dif­fi­cul­ty, envi­ron­ment) to our fail­ures. Hind­sight bias is the ene­my of reli­able debrief­ing and feed­back, since once the effects of a deci­sion are known, its func­tion is to give us the feel­ing that we always knew before­hand what was going to hap­pen. It acts as a con­trol of uncer­tain­ty: “it was obvi­ous, I knew it would work”. In a way, one becomes a lawyer who seeks to exon­er­ate or incrim­i­nate those accused of a bad deci­sion, which results in a search for those guilty and respon­si­ble who “knew but said noth­ing”. The cur­rent health cri­sis shows that the witch-hunt can rapid­ly take hold. To avoid this trap, both for one­self and for oth­ers, it is impor­tant to record the max­i­mum amount of infor­ma­tion avail­able at the time deci­sions are made. This enables us to car­ry out a real inves­ti­ga­tion after­wards, with the aim of improv­ing our future deci­sion-mak­ing and to avoid the lawyer in us con­struct­ing a “fake news fic­tion” sto­ry­line, after the fact¹¹.