Do Decision Making Techniques Really Work?
October 2nd, 2007I’ve been thinking about decision making for over six years, and sometimes I start to wonder: do decision making techniques really work?
All this talk about decision making errors, how the neuroscience of our brains contributes to subtle and undetectable assumptions and errors, makes me think that there is little we can do to make conscious adjustments to improve our decision making.
Every decision making technique I’ve discussed to this point works by forcing us to explicitly consider each option, it’s positives and negatives or how it compares to other options.
But inherent in those simple methods is that every positive and negative factor, every comparison between options, incorporates our subconscious decision making errors.
In my personal SWOT analysis, I had an easier time coming up with strengths than weaknesses when thinking about myself, but was better at thinking of threats than opportunities when thinking about the external situation. Is that the truth of the situation, or is that because it’s easier for us to criticize others than ourselves?
While trying to figure out what to do with my life, I listed more positive things for the options I already preferred. Is that because they really are better, or because I am trying to avoid cognitive dissonance?
When I…you get my point.
In all our decisions, it is difficult (and possibly impossible) to subjectively know whether we made the decision based on reasons, or whether we created the reasons to justify our decision. Research is showing the latter.
But if that’s true, have we already made the decision before we even start any decision making techniques? In the exercises I’ve done here I’ve usually had a few insights while I’m working through my a decision technique, but I don’t know that it has ever changed the outcome of my decision.
Are decision making techniques just another layer of justification for a decision we’ve already made?
The one thing that gives me hope is the influence that different experiences can have on our implicit associations. If we can at least change our socially learned biases, maybe some improvement can be made.
Just food for thought.
-zot
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October 2nd, 2007 at 12:35 pm
The very fact that you asked yourself these questions indicates that you are working to overcome the kinds of biases you point out. Questioning your real basis for making a decision (or justifying a decision you’ve really already made) is the sign of someone who is introspectively examining his/her thought processes to avoid biases. It’s the person who is *not* questioning his/her thought processes that we need to worry about.
Jeff
October 3rd, 2007 at 9:58 am
Jeff:
I think you’re right in a sort of general sense that it is better to question, but I still wonder whether we can really ultimately do anything consciously to correct the unconscious processes that bias us in one direction or the other.
Maybe the real answer lies in moderating the information we take in so that our perceptions are equally affected in all directions or something like that. Not that it’s a realistic idea.
Good thoughts, thanks.
October 4th, 2007 at 9:23 am
Zot, you can probably guess my take on this. Your writing triggered me to think about an interesting loop:
Suppose I want to make a “good” decision. So I go looking for some strategies. Hopefully those strategies will have a causal inpact on what my final decision is (otherwise, why use a strategy at all?). But how do I choose a decision making technique? That can be a hard decision……and so the loop goes.
But aside from that digression, to tell if decision making techniques help us make “better” decisions, there must be some measure of sucess. In some areas that might be easy–investors might simply care about how much monry they make.
But personal decisions seem much tougher to evaluate. Should I decide to start a family or pursue a career? What is the measure of a “good” decision? happiness? wealth? health? in what time frame for comparing these outcomes (1, 5, 50 years)?
The blog is great. My favorite part about it is that it’s stimulating and makes me think about this stuff in a concrete way. Keep it up!
October 4th, 2007 at 11:33 am
Hey Eric. I just ran across this article at The Situationist that talks about the distinction between maximizing and satisficing decision makers.
Maximizers perform and exhaustive search for information, while satisficers pick the first option that seems to satisfy.
Maybe the reason that you find the life decisions so difficult is that you are a maximizer, but the information you are trying to gather is so fluid it is impossible to arrive at a conclusion.
Excellent point also that when talking about ‘better’ decisions we need to have metrics by which to evaluate. I tend to just go with ‘if it feels good after I did it, then it was right’, but that’s not very amenable to analysis.
October 4th, 2007 at 2:29 pm
The Situationist is a great blog and that article was right on. Thanks.