The Decision Strategist

On the heels of my post about the role of automatic association contributing to bad decisions, Neuromarketing has a post describing the visual relationship with chocolate addiction. Basically, pictures of chocolate stimulate the same part of our brain that is active during habit forming and addictive behaviors.

Neuromarketing also suggests that marketers of less well-known brands of chocolate include actual pictures on their packaging as a way of enticing people to buy, and that people trying to avoid chocolate should also avoid chocolate in video and pictures.

I think they are right, but there is more that could be done, and can really you avoid images of all the things you want to do but are trying not to? You can think of it as a self-discipline issue, and Steve Pavlina has an great series on self-discipline.

But we can use some of our knowledge of decision making to help as well. Aside from examining our self-stories to help fight advertising, lets use the fact that so much of our behavior is associative in origin.

If you want to stop eating chocolate, don’t smell the flowers

One of the best ways to break a habit or resist temptation incarnate is to avoid the things we associate with the temptation.

If as a child you were given chocolate on Sunday after working in the flowerbed, you probably associate flowers with chocolate. Every time you see a flower, the part of your brain that thinks of chocolate is also stimulated.

It’s a silly example, but it illustrates how seemingly unrelated things can be causing us to want the things we are trying to resist.

First begin by thinking of all the times you eat chocolate. Where are you? What are you wearing? Is it hot outside, or raining? What did you eat earlier? How are you feeling?

What kinds of things show up repeatedly in your chocolate eating experiences? If every time you wear that red shirt you have to go to the store for an afternoon chocolate snack, you might associate something with the shirt with chocolate.

Since I’m trying to break my chai addiction, I’m going to keep a log of every time I want to drink chai and write down as many details as I can. I’ll post back next week with the results.

Have a habit or a food you are trying to resist? Feel free to do the same over the next week and let me know what your associations were. Then next week we’ll start trying to break the habit by avoiding the things that we associate with it.

-zot

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For our new decision making technique of the week, we’ll look at paired comparisons . Paired Comparisons are a method for comparing options when trying to decide which problem to tackle first, or which choice is the best one. For instance, I’m writing a web app and I have several directions I could take. Which one do I focus on?

Which Problem First?

I have several problems I can tackle while building the app, all of which can be done now. Of course, some of them fall into a natural order because they will be easier to do after another problem is fixed. But it is still flexible enough that I’m not sure how to proceed, which is causing me to work a little bit on each one and not really get anywhere.

List Your Options

Begin by listing all of the options that you are considering. If an option clearly depends on another option list it anyway. This method will address those options in the process.

• Scoring Logic
• CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) of options and tools
• Interface
• Design
• Social network functionality
• Authentication and Permissions

I could use a pareto analysis to rank these options, but they are fairly interrelated, so it might help to compare each one to the other individually.

Create A Matrix

Create a matrix with each option in both rows and columns. Block out the bottom triangle of the matrix and the center diagonal like so:

Compare Options and Calculate Rank

For each blank cell, compare the row and column option. Put the letter of the one that is more important and the score (say between 1 and 5).

Now add up the score for each cell in which an option beat the other option. Divide the total score for each option by the total number of points awarded to get a percent rank. The resulting list is a priority list for how you should handle your problems, or for which option is most important. Here are my results:

What I really like about this method is that it reveals connections between paths that we may not notice when we are considering all paths together. By considering each one individually in relation to the other, we pick up on those connections.

My original options were implicitly ranked when I wrote them down, so I’m very surprised to see that authentication and permissions make it’s way to the top. In retrospect, it makes sense that the application should be designed with attention to authentication from the beginning, but I haven’t been thinking in those terms.

Have any of you used paired comparison to make decisions? What do you think of the method?

-zot

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I’ve talked about several different ways in which our brains take shortcuts that lead to bad decision making. But there are factors that affect our decisions in more subtle ways. For instance, Our Brain Fills Visual Gaps in what we see. It tends to pick out general outlines and a few key items in our field of vision, and fill in the textures and colors based on assumptions.

We place a lot of emphasis on memory, especially in lawsuits, but how smart is it to rely on eye witness accounts when our memories and visual perceptions are so faulty?

Memory is associative, and so memory techniques are based on creating strong visualizations. The technique of visualizing things you want to remember in rooms inside your house is amazingly effective because it involves a variety of senses. Regular memorization works by repetition, which is a poor utilization of the strengths of how our memory works.

Chess masters play chess in a similar way, recognizing entire patterns of pieces rather than a few pieces.

What if there was a similar process for decision making? We typically make decisions guided by our emotional response to each option. This process works extremely well for most decisions, and takes a minimum amount of processing. But in some situations it fails spectacularly.

Could there be a decision making technique similar to the memorization technique, that makes use of our associative tendencies? Or is that exactly what we do now? What would such a process look like?

-zot

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It’s not often that I see a fantastic article that is spot on, especially in syndicated media, but The Fed’s Subprime Solution, an opinion piece by James Grant at the New York Times, is excellent.

capitalism without financial failure is not capitalism at all, but a kind of socialism for the rich.

Big Business Bail Out

I’m not a fan of proposals by some presidential candidates to provide a fund to bail out people with defaulting mortgages. But I am really not a fan of the tendency by our federal government to bail out big business. Lenders and other giant credit companies are part of what got us into the current credit crunch, and they should not be able to walk away supported by the public’s tax dollars.

Part of our quest to understand and improve our own decision making must necessarily involve the examination and criticism of other’s decisions. Perhaps more importantly, it must include responsibility for our decisions. As big credit companies come to depend on a public bail out in times of stress, they increase risk and instability for us all, and cost us a lot of money in the meantime.

-zot

ps - If my writing is dense today, it’s because I’ve been reading Equality by Default, an excellent essay on the perils of modernity. The best book I’ve read in several years.

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