Three keys to making good decisions

The World Health Organ­isa­tion (WHO) recently lis­ted know­ing how to make decisions as one of the ten psychoso­cial skills required to respond effect­ively to the demands and chal­lenges of mod­ern daily life. Clas­sic­ally, neur­os­cience dis­tin­guishes three stages in decision mak­ing¹: defin­i­tion of pref­er­ences, exe­cu­tion and obser­va­tion of an action and finally exper­i­ence of the res­ult. Here, I offer some of the pit­falls with­in each of these stages and offer sug­ges­tions of how to over­come them by look­ing at three major psy­cho­lo­gic­al duels.

“Am making the right decision?”

The pro­cess of ‘decid­ing’ con­sists of man­aging the con­flict that occurs between the two speeds at which our thoughts occur. ‘Sys­tem 1’ is rap­id, low effort, intu­it­ive and heur­ist­ic, com­pared to sys­tem 2 that is slow, sys­tem­at­ic, logic­al, and delib­er­ate². Both have their advant­ages (speed, ease, reli­ab­il­ity, rel­ev­ance) and dis­ad­vant­ages (bias, noise, cost, fatigue), which are the source of much sci­entif­ic debate. Non­ethe­less, the key to man­aging this duel is found in pro­cess of inhib­i­tion³; in oth­er words, suc­ceed­ing (when neces­sary) in sus­pend­ing hasty judge­ment, ready-made routines, con­sen­su­al ste­reo­types and cog­nit­ive biases – in oth­er words, know­ing when not to act.

Of course, it is more dif­fi­cult to inhib­it routines than it is fol­low pre-learned pat­terns because it requires new inform­a­tion to be learned and prac­tised. As such, apply­ing strict selectiv­ity to a decision con­sists of meas­ur­ing and weigh­ing up the duel between the two speeds of the mind that drive our choices⁴⁵, know­ing that some­times intu­it­ive decisions may, in fact, prove to be more effect­ive⁶.

“Did I do the right thing?”

The great­er the invest­ment in time, energy, or resources (human, fin­an­cial, etc.), the stronger the will to legit­im­ise the decision taken. But how far can we per­severe to the point of no longer being object­ive, no longer see­ing the facts or hear­ing the argu­ments that clearly call into ques­tion the decision we made? While it is good and socially val­ued to be per­sist­ent, it is import­ant to identi­fy the almost obsess­ive pur­suit of an action against all object­ive reas­on⁸⁹.

Once the decision has been made, the implac­able logic of ‘sunk costs’ sets in, with its share of well-known cog­nit­ive biases that are hard to shake off: hypo­thes­is con­firm­a­tion (I look for argu­ments that con­firm my decision and only those argu­ments), status quo (if there is no reas­on to change, then why change?), loss aver­sion (to risk los­ing because of a change is psy­cho­lo­gic­ally unbear­able).

It is dif­fi­cult to fight against this dilemma alone since we are often only dimly aware of our own cog­nit­ive biases. Hence, tak­ing coun­ter­meas­ures can make it pos­sible to avoid these traps before­hand. For example, ensur­ing that the people who make decisions are not the same as those who eval­u­ate the effects and there­fore the con­tinu­ation of the decision taken. This is why, for example, new pres­id­ents who come to power can more eas­ily stop pro­cesses that were star­ted 20 years ago and which every­one knew were ineffective…

“Was I right?”

Our minds are par­tic­u­larly adept at recon­struct­ing past sequences by attrib­ut­ing intern­al causes (skill, effort) to our suc­cesses and extern­al causes (dif­fi­culty, envir­on­ment) to our fail­ures. Hind­sight bias is the enemy of reli­able debrief­ing and feed­back, since once the effects of a decision are known, its func­tion is to give us the feel­ing that we always knew before­hand what was going to hap­pen. It acts as a con­trol of uncer­tainty: “it was obvi­ous, I knew it would work”. In a way, one becomes a law­yer who seeks to exon­er­ate or incrim­in­ate those accused of a bad decision, which res­ults in a search for those guilty and respons­ible who “knew but said noth­ing”. The cur­rent health crisis shows that the witch-hunt can rap­idly take hold. To avoid this trap, both for one­self and for oth­ers, it is import­ant to record the max­im­um amount of inform­a­tion avail­able at the time decisions are made. This enables us to carry out a real invest­ig­a­tion after­wards, with the aim of improv­ing our future decision-mak­ing and to avoid the law­yer in us con­struct­ing a “fake news fic­tion” storyline, after the fact¹¹.