The Decision Strategist

In Want Versus Should in Advertising I talked about how our want self gets activated more strongly for short term consumption decisions and our should self gets activated more strongly if consumption will happen later.

It occurs to me that this behavior isn’t limited to consumption. The behavior plays out in all decisions. Do I want to go running or keep laying on the couch? Am I going to eat ice cream? Do I want to apologize to my spouse? Basically all those decisions whose long term rewards make the short term cost worthwhile.

It’s easy to plan to do them in a few days, but that’s because we have our long term hats on. When the moment of action comes, we’re thinking with our short term hats.

Discipline is usually characterized as how good you are at thinking with the long term hat over the short term hat, but we all fall prey to the negative aspects of the short term hat.

Not to make the short hat a villain. The short term hat may play a role in a lot of the positive spontaneous behavior that we as humans value. Spontaneous displays of affection or acts of generosity and support.

The million dollar question is what methods can we use to emphasize long term decision making when we know that’s ultimately what is good for us, but still encourage short term creative spontaneity?

Popularity: 5%

Vote for this post on: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 11th, 2007 at 9:18 am and is filed under Decision Making, Human Error.