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Investigating Indecision: Why We Can't Seem to Make Up Our Minds
The WRAP technique for decision making
- Widen your options: challenge yourself to consider alternatives.
- Reality-test your assumptions: run small experiments so you can know rather than predict which decision will work best for you.
- Attain distance before deciding with the try the 10/10/10 approach: How would you feel about this decision 10 minutes from now, 10 months from now, and 10 years from now?
- Prepare to be wrong: things could always go wrong. Prepare for it in advance.
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SIMILAR ARTICLES & IDEAS:
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Key Ideas
Good decisions
To make good decisions, we generally need to do the following:
- Identify the decision: recognizing the need to make a decision, and identifying what that decision inv...
Why people struggle with decision making
- The main reason why decision-making is hard is that every decision makes us go through a process that is most times difficult and complex, and having difficulties with any part of it can hinder the whole process.
- The emotional difficulty that we face when we need to pick only one of multiple possible options means that we have to forego several alternatives that we may find appealing. This is associated with the concept of FOMO (the fear of missing out).
- The decision-making process can be very demanding, from a cognitive and an emotional perspective. Also, the act of making a decision is tiring in itself, since it depletes the cognitive resources.
- Being tired and sleep-deprived can make it more difficult for us to process information, and more likely for us to suffer from various cognitive biases that get in the way of making good decisions.
Barry Schwartz
“The existence of multiple alternatives makes it easy for us to imagine alternatives that don’t exist—alternatives that combine the attractive features of the ones that do exist. And to the extent that we engage our imaginations in this way, we will be even less satisfied with the alternative we end up choosing. So… a greater variety of choices actually makes us feel worse.”
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Key Ideas
Maximization
Also known as Fear of Better Options (F.O.B.O.), is the relentless researching of all possible options for fear that you’ll miss out on the “best” one.
Though maximizers tend to make b...
Mostly Fine Decision (MFD)
Your M.F.D. is the minimum outcome you’re willing to accept for a decision.
It’s the outcome you’d be fine with, even if it’s not the absolute best possibility.
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Key Ideas
Information that matches our beliefs
We surround ourselves with it: We tend to like people who think like us; if we agree with someone's beliefs, we're more likely to be friends with them.
This makes sense, but it means ...
The "swimmer's body illusion"
It's a thinking mistake and it occurs when we confuse selection factors with results.
Professional swimmers don't have perfect bodies because they train extensively. Rather, they are good swimmers because of their physiques.
The sunk cost fallacy
It plays on this tendency of ours to emphasize loss over gain.
The term sunk cost refers to any cost that has been paid already and cannot be recovered. The reason we can't ignore the cost, even though it's already been paid, is that we're wired to feel loss far more strongly than gain.