We are forced to make decisions almost every second. From ordering coffee and choosing a suit to evaluating job offers and pursuing business opportunities. So, for food alone, we do this more than 200 times a day. In addition to the fact that we spend a lot of time and energy on this, we often make the wrong choice. Making a list of pros and cons doesn't always help. But next time you feel like flipping a coin, remember this post.

Source

Make big decisions in the morning

Let's say you've made the decision to follow a diet: no soy, no sugar, or whatever. And suddenly, three weeks later, you’re going broke buying clothes that are too expensive or giving up tasks that are typically easy for you at work.

Long-term adherence to the diet caused the so-called decision fatigue - tired of decision-making . The energy for this process comes from a central source in the brain. Every decision we make takes away cognitive resources from other tasks that require mental effort.

The more decisions you make in a day, the more you get tired. Therefore, leave the important, strategic issues for the morning.

Be careful with feedback

After spending several years in a safe but boring job, you are contemplating a risky, but ultimately more profitable and interesting opportunity. You are looking for other perspectives from friends, parents, or mentors to make the right choice. But instead of clarifying your decision, the chorus of voices complicates the situation even more. They talk about all the risks involved, and gradually you start to doubt yourself. You give up an exotic opportunity, and all sorts of negative "what ifs" take up residence in your mind.

Feedback sometimes helps to look at the problem more broadly, but when all voices are the same, we feel the urge to match the opinion of others. We follow the majority, sometimes at the expense of our own happiness. As researchers at the University of Cambridge have found, this peer pressure influences our investment decisions.

Participants in the study [ Baddeley, M, 2010 ] were given an option to buy the stock and were told about its past profitability. Then one group was notified that four other people had already bought the asset. The second group was told that everyone else had turned down the offer. Those who heard stories about “buying” bought stock almost 80% of the time, while those who were in the group “rejected” bought it only 25% of the time. This suggests that even when we have all the information, social norms can significantly influence our choices.

However, the impact of social norms varies widely depending on the individual and the situation. Highly empathic, adventurous, and impulsive people are more likely to be herded, while extroverts and confident people are less likely to follow the crowd.

Therefore, before collecting opinions, analyze your personality. If you are particularly determined to avoid punishment, earn external rewards, or please others, know that people can greatly influence your decision. In this case, try to limit yourself to the most objective information.

Source

Trust your heart if your head knows what to do

Your well-thought-out and well-researched list of pros and cons points to option A, but your intuition gravitates towards option B. You spend hours indecisive ... The head-to-heart case puts you in a hopeless situation. Pick a "head" and your intuition will keep nagging you. But if an intuitive decision is based on incomplete information, it also doesn't really want to be trusted.

Scientists have come to the interesting conclusion that you can only trust your intuition if the decision you make is within your competence. Researchers conducted an experiment [ ErikDane, 2012 ] in which participants judged whether designer bags were real or fake. After the students were tested for their knowledge of fashion, they were assigned to either an “intuitive” or “analytical” group.

Those in the "intuitive" group were given five seconds to decide if the bag was a fake. The “analysts” were given two minutes to study the features that helped distinguish the real product from the fake (ie tailoring, design, etc.) before making their decision.

For students with a high background knowledge of designer bags, intuition was more effective than analysis . But for those who lacked experience, a two-minute deliberation period led to better decisions.

Beware of cognitive biases

Since we are not robots, we often base our decisions on our emotions instead of letting our intellect dictate our every move. Often, we unknowingly use irrational ways of thinking (also known as cognitive biases) to inform decisions. These mental labels not only shut off our objectivity, but also give us false confidence in bad choices. Here's what cognitive scientist Daniel Kahneman writes about this in Think Slow, Decide Fast:

"We are often confident even when we are wrong, and an objective observer is more likely to detect our mistakes than ourselves."

Learning about these cognitive biases and noticing when they interfere with your own decision-making process will reduce your chances of making choices that you later regret.

Consider a decision in a foreign language

Researchers at the University of Chicago found that thinking in a foreign language leads to more rational decision making [ Sayuri Hayakawa, 2016 ]. According to study co-author Sayuri Hayakawa, this is largely due to the fact that people cannot separate their native language from their emotions, which harms logical thinking . On the contrary, the absence of an emotional connection with a foreign language allows for a more rational thought process.

Source

For example, in one experiment, participants were asked to place bets on a coin toss. The conditions of the game were set in such a way that the chances of winning were over 50%. If the students accepted all 15 bets, they would be guaranteed their winnings.

When participants were offered bets in their native English, they accepted them 50% of the time; if they were told the same thing in Spanish, they agreed 71% of the time.

Try to reflect on the problem in a foreign language and maybe you will see more possibilities in your problem.

---