You frequently write on dating and mating, and this applies. A radio preacher in the 80's said "The goal is not to find the one spouse who will be perfect. It's to avoid the thousands who will make you miserable." I raised my children on this.
I’ve done interior design work and the amount of time clients will agonize about paint colors is excruciating. Choose. If you hate it, we can paint over it. This is not a life and death decision. Realizing that has always helped me be very decisive. I figure I have the capacity and capability to deal with the outcome…whatever it is.
I've noticed the decision-making paralysis re: ordering from a menu at a restaurant in several intelligent people. Their rationale is FOMO and regret avoidance. I also wonder about the relationship between adults with a domineering parent that they still aim to please and decision-making paralysis. Some adults who are accustomed to an authority guiding their decisions feel lost and overwhelmed when they have to be the authority on their choices.
"In trials where the number of dots on each side of the screen was nearly equal, participants took significantly longer to choose than when there was a clear disparity. Again, this is irrational."
How is it irrational to take more time to complete a more difficult task than an easier task? This judgment sounds more like it describes a difference in understanding of the rules of the game between the participants and the observers. The observers wrote the rules, and thus would understand how to respond to them the best; the rules are new to the participants, and few would immediately realize that the best payoff would be from rapid button-mashing rather than careful consideration.
I recall a character from one of John Barth's books who suffered from analysis paralysis, and followed a simple decision order to break a tie: Sinistrality, Antecedence, and Alphabetical Priority. That is, he always chose the option to the left, the first option, or the option that began with the first letter. I loved John Barth when I was a teenager.
As a prior commenter has said, one realizes in time that if one is spending a lot of time on a decision with no success that the two choices must be roughly even, and it doesn't matter that much which one chooses. If there's a time constraint, pick one (left, soonest, first?) and move on; if there's no constraint, put the decision off until it's necessary and give your subconscious time to speak to you (e.g. sleep on it).
I have been saying this since watching my law school classmates agonize over what top tier law firm offer to accept. As I observed at the time, if it seems like a hard decision, you are probably choosing between equally good alternatives. What you do after making the decision is far more important that the decision itself.
I'd be interested to see how this links to perfectionism. My hunch is that individuals with perfectionism would be significantly more prone to this type of behaviour.
When we bought our first house, I remember thinking "sheesh, the realtor wants us to submit our offer today after spending less than an hour looking at this place....it takes me longer to decide where to go out for dinner on our anniversary than whether or not to spend SIX FIGURES on this piece of real estate!"
There is a kernel of truth here. Since 2012 one of the businesses I have run every spring and summer is an ice cream truck.
It always cracks me up and entertains me to watch customers — especially kids — go through the roller coaster of emotion as they try to decide what to order from the large menu (50 items) and with mom or dad perhaps insisting on just one item.
I have also noticed with interest the different words people use when talking about making a selection—
Some say: they have so many options!
Some say: they have so many choices!
Some say nervously: so many decisions! (While biting their fingernails)
I have noticed some difference here culturally between, let’s say native Spanish speakers vs native English speakers too.
Many of your examples resonated immediately and strongly, and some fell a bit flat. One reason is that in real life a decision that seems to be between choice options of equal value might feel that way due to lack of prior experience and/or information, which could at least in principle be obtained “in time” (the Rome vs. Barcelona example comes to mind). And having at least had *some experience with making a choice that ended up disastrous* (maybe a romance gone bad or a very poor vacation time) may contribute to a person having a felt sense of not wanting to rush in these kinds of situations. That, to me at least, makes some of the examples different from the Mars vs. Snickers or selecting arrays with highest number of dots choices. As a second, and somewhat unrelated, matter I also assume that hard choices that a person goes through multiple times (for most people I can mentally simulate well) would speed up over time. It thus seems maybe somewhat rational that a human will initially spend more cognitive resources if they have a general experience that similar enough choices are part of their future…?
I feel like analysis paralysis is growing in the US, as more and more consumers have experienced making purchasing decisions that turned out to be utterly fraudulent, whether an actual phishing scam or a false promise by a major pharma company. No one believes any claim.
The thing that screws with decision-making is stakeholders. They piss me off. Get the hell out of my decision will ya! Just kidding... sorta'.
I see decision-making as problem-solving and I believe I am good at it.
I am so good at problem-solving that I made my career on facilitating decision-making within organizations. But it is also one of my blind spots in leadership where I misread the room. At times I want to rage over how damn complicated people are with their egos, emotions, needs, wants, judgments, etc. For example, I am CEO of a not for profit corporation and report to a board of directors. I present to them our operational status and then our business strategy where I have solved all the problems and made all the decisions (after a robust process to back all the decisions), and all it does is make them dig deep in criticizing more of the detail... and often detail they do not understand.
My mother was dying and my weepy stepfather commented that this would be the last Superbowl party he could have with her (that is where the met... a blind date at a friend's house during the Superbowl.) I was so busy at the time, but I solved the problem and made the decisions with my wife to coordinate a party with all of my father and mother's friends. My father ended up unhappy, and so did my brother and sister in-law. I made the mistake of not recognizing needed decision criteria for making the event even more complicated by their need to participate in the party planning... so that they would share in the ownership and pride of throwing the party. My father, my brother and my sister in-law were all frankly pissed... having this opinion that my wife and I were hording the accolades for throwing a party for my dying mother... when we were feakin' irritated that we had to do this at a time when we were both slammed with work and family obligations and did not have the time. I had solved the problem and made the decisions for the party which was a success by all normal party-assessment criteria... but in the end I failed to really solve the problem nor make the right decision... BECAUSE OF THE DAMN STAKEHOLDERS!
I think this fear of hidden or difficult stakeholders, along with a general fear of failure... making the wrong decisions, is why some people are frozen in decision paralysis. Or else they obfuscate making a decision.
Me... I am willing to piss off some stakeholders to make the decisions I think are critical.
Interesting about restaurant ordering. My wife is a social butterfly and when we are out to dinner with friends her social energy level is on high to the point that she cannot focus her brain on the menu choices. It is like there is so much internal noise in her head around fun conversation... that the part of her brain function needed to decide what to eat... well, it is unavailable. She becomes a stakeholder in my ordering at that point... I have to guide her and really order for both of us.
My point here is that our decisions are complicated by the fact that other people in our lives are participants in our choices regardless if we welcome it or not. They complicate our decision making even though we might not know it. Understanding that our hesitation might be because of this... our fear of displeasing someone in our lives with our choices.. can be liberating when we break though and tell ourselves that we should ignore some of that and chose the damn box of cereal!
Thanks for this thought-provoking article. Sharing a few thoughts:
- Time: In the Kit Kat vs Mars experiment, unless the participants are encouraged to optimize for the time it takes to make a decision, it doesn't seem fair to think of their dwelling on the decision as "irrational". Participants were optimizing for the best option, and time, in this experiment, does not seem to inflate or deflate the value of Kit Kat or Mars. In the dot experiment however time does play a role it seems.
- Opportunity cost: When presented with two equally valuable options, the opportunity cost is higher than when one option is obviously better.
- Differences in similar things: When two things are similar, the differences are subtle and less obvious by definition. It makes sense to look deeper and find differences. Similar to the gym membership you mentioned where proximity to a cafe or grocery store might not be obvious without spending more time with the choices.
You frequently write on dating and mating, and this applies. A radio preacher in the 80's said "The goal is not to find the one spouse who will be perfect. It's to avoid the thousands who will make you miserable." I raised my children on this.
Not that they listened, but hey, I said my lines.
I’ve done interior design work and the amount of time clients will agonize about paint colors is excruciating. Choose. If you hate it, we can paint over it. This is not a life and death decision. Realizing that has always helped me be very decisive. I figure I have the capacity and capability to deal with the outcome…whatever it is.
I've noticed the decision-making paralysis re: ordering from a menu at a restaurant in several intelligent people. Their rationale is FOMO and regret avoidance. I also wonder about the relationship between adults with a domineering parent that they still aim to please and decision-making paralysis. Some adults who are accustomed to an authority guiding their decisions feel lost and overwhelmed when they have to be the authority on their choices.
"In trials where the number of dots on each side of the screen was nearly equal, participants took significantly longer to choose than when there was a clear disparity. Again, this is irrational."
How is it irrational to take more time to complete a more difficult task than an easier task? This judgment sounds more like it describes a difference in understanding of the rules of the game between the participants and the observers. The observers wrote the rules, and thus would understand how to respond to them the best; the rules are new to the participants, and few would immediately realize that the best payoff would be from rapid button-mashing rather than careful consideration.
I recall a character from one of John Barth's books who suffered from analysis paralysis, and followed a simple decision order to break a tie: Sinistrality, Antecedence, and Alphabetical Priority. That is, he always chose the option to the left, the first option, or the option that began with the first letter. I loved John Barth when I was a teenager.
As a prior commenter has said, one realizes in time that if one is spending a lot of time on a decision with no success that the two choices must be roughly even, and it doesn't matter that much which one chooses. If there's a time constraint, pick one (left, soonest, first?) and move on; if there's no constraint, put the decision off until it's necessary and give your subconscious time to speak to you (e.g. sleep on it).
I have been saying this since watching my law school classmates agonize over what top tier law firm offer to accept. As I observed at the time, if it seems like a hard decision, you are probably choosing between equally good alternatives. What you do after making the decision is far more important that the decision itself.
I'd be interested to see how this links to perfectionism. My hunch is that individuals with perfectionism would be significantly more prone to this type of behaviour.
When we bought our first house, I remember thinking "sheesh, the realtor wants us to submit our offer today after spending less than an hour looking at this place....it takes me longer to decide where to go out for dinner on our anniversary than whether or not to spend SIX FIGURES on this piece of real estate!"
lol, John Barth, that’s great!
“Making choices” feels scary. “Having options” feels empowering.”
There is a kernel of truth here. Since 2012 one of the businesses I have run every spring and summer is an ice cream truck.
It always cracks me up and entertains me to watch customers — especially kids — go through the roller coaster of emotion as they try to decide what to order from the large menu (50 items) and with mom or dad perhaps insisting on just one item.
I have also noticed with interest the different words people use when talking about making a selection—
Some say: they have so many options!
Some say: they have so many choices!
Some say nervously: so many decisions! (While biting their fingernails)
I have noticed some difference here culturally between, let’s say native Spanish speakers vs native English speakers too.
Many of your examples resonated immediately and strongly, and some fell a bit flat. One reason is that in real life a decision that seems to be between choice options of equal value might feel that way due to lack of prior experience and/or information, which could at least in principle be obtained “in time” (the Rome vs. Barcelona example comes to mind). And having at least had *some experience with making a choice that ended up disastrous* (maybe a romance gone bad or a very poor vacation time) may contribute to a person having a felt sense of not wanting to rush in these kinds of situations. That, to me at least, makes some of the examples different from the Mars vs. Snickers or selecting arrays with highest number of dots choices. As a second, and somewhat unrelated, matter I also assume that hard choices that a person goes through multiple times (for most people I can mentally simulate well) would speed up over time. It thus seems maybe somewhat rational that a human will initially spend more cognitive resources if they have a general experience that similar enough choices are part of their future…?
I feel like analysis paralysis is growing in the US, as more and more consumers have experienced making purchasing decisions that turned out to be utterly fraudulent, whether an actual phishing scam or a false promise by a major pharma company. No one believes any claim.
The thing that screws with decision-making is stakeholders. They piss me off. Get the hell out of my decision will ya! Just kidding... sorta'.
I see decision-making as problem-solving and I believe I am good at it.
I am so good at problem-solving that I made my career on facilitating decision-making within organizations. But it is also one of my blind spots in leadership where I misread the room. At times I want to rage over how damn complicated people are with their egos, emotions, needs, wants, judgments, etc. For example, I am CEO of a not for profit corporation and report to a board of directors. I present to them our operational status and then our business strategy where I have solved all the problems and made all the decisions (after a robust process to back all the decisions), and all it does is make them dig deep in criticizing more of the detail... and often detail they do not understand.
My mother was dying and my weepy stepfather commented that this would be the last Superbowl party he could have with her (that is where the met... a blind date at a friend's house during the Superbowl.) I was so busy at the time, but I solved the problem and made the decisions with my wife to coordinate a party with all of my father and mother's friends. My father ended up unhappy, and so did my brother and sister in-law. I made the mistake of not recognizing needed decision criteria for making the event even more complicated by their need to participate in the party planning... so that they would share in the ownership and pride of throwing the party. My father, my brother and my sister in-law were all frankly pissed... having this opinion that my wife and I were hording the accolades for throwing a party for my dying mother... when we were feakin' irritated that we had to do this at a time when we were both slammed with work and family obligations and did not have the time. I had solved the problem and made the decisions for the party which was a success by all normal party-assessment criteria... but in the end I failed to really solve the problem nor make the right decision... BECAUSE OF THE DAMN STAKEHOLDERS!
I think this fear of hidden or difficult stakeholders, along with a general fear of failure... making the wrong decisions, is why some people are frozen in decision paralysis. Or else they obfuscate making a decision.
Me... I am willing to piss off some stakeholders to make the decisions I think are critical.
Interesting about restaurant ordering. My wife is a social butterfly and when we are out to dinner with friends her social energy level is on high to the point that she cannot focus her brain on the menu choices. It is like there is so much internal noise in her head around fun conversation... that the part of her brain function needed to decide what to eat... well, it is unavailable. She becomes a stakeholder in my ordering at that point... I have to guide her and really order for both of us.
My point here is that our decisions are complicated by the fact that other people in our lives are participants in our choices regardless if we welcome it or not. They complicate our decision making even though we might not know it. Understanding that our hesitation might be because of this... our fear of displeasing someone in our lives with our choices.. can be liberating when we break though and tell ourselves that we should ignore some of that and chose the damn box of cereal!
Thanks for this thought-provoking article. Sharing a few thoughts:
- Time: In the Kit Kat vs Mars experiment, unless the participants are encouraged to optimize for the time it takes to make a decision, it doesn't seem fair to think of their dwelling on the decision as "irrational". Participants were optimizing for the best option, and time, in this experiment, does not seem to inflate or deflate the value of Kit Kat or Mars. In the dot experiment however time does play a role it seems.
- Opportunity cost: When presented with two equally valuable options, the opportunity cost is higher than when one option is obviously better.
- Differences in similar things: When two things are similar, the differences are subtle and less obvious by definition. It makes sense to look deeper and find differences. Similar to the gym membership you mentioned where proximity to a cafe or grocery store might not be obvious without spending more time with the choices.
Thanks!
Tynan has some good posts on decision-making:
1. "Patient and Decisive": https://tynan.com/patient/
2. "Consider the Full Range of Options on Big Decisions": https://tynan.com/fullrange/