The Decision Strategist

In The Role of Automatic Association I suggested one of the best ways of improving our decision making was to vary our experiences. That idea deserves some expansion. There are ways in which new experiences help to correct our decision making errors:

• Correcting the confirmation bias. New experiences lessen the effect of the confirmation bias, helping to free our perceptions and quick decisions from inaccurate stereotypes (e.g. crime has gone down the past several years, but we still think crime is high because we see it on the news all the time).
• Expanding automatic associations. Automatic associations, such as associating women with family and men with career, can change quickly when you experience situations that disprove those relationships. This keeps you from exhibiting a subconscious preference that can lead to suboptimal decision making.
• Enlarging our idea of normal. The conformity bias keeps us from doing new things that might be a great idea but aren’t condoned by our peer group. New experiences expand our idea of normal, exposing us to new ideas and increasing the likelihood that we will do something differently.
• Giving us new metaphors. We tend to think in terms of metaphors, and new experiences can give us new metaphors. It’s like adding a whole new set of words to our language.

I’m sure there are other ways. In the quest to keep our behavior and decisions from becoming habitual, new experiences force us to learn new things and to do things differently. Steve Pavlina has a great post that explains how the mind works and some ways in which changing the input (experience) expands the capacity for new output (choices).

-zot

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This entry was posted on Saturday, September 8th, 2007 at 8:20 pm and is filed under Decision Making.