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The Art of Decision-Making

By Joshua Rothman

In July of 1838, Charles Darwin was twenty-nine years old and single. Two years earlier, he had returned from his voyage aboard H.M.S. Beagle with the observations that would eventually form the basis of “ On the Origin of Species .” In the meantime, he faced a more pressing analytical problem. Darwin was considering proposing to his cousin Emma Wedgwood, but he worried that marriage and children might impede his scientific career. To figure out what to do, he made two lists. “Loss of time,” he wrote on the first. “Perhaps quarreling. . . . Cannot read in the evenings. . . . Anxiety and responsibility. Perhaps my wife won’t like London; then the sentence is banishment and degradation into indolent, idle fool.” On the second, he wrote, “Children (if it Please God). Constant companion (and friend in old age). . . . Home, & someone to take care of house.” He noted that it was “intolerable to think of spending one’s whole life, like a neuter bee, working, working. . . . Only picture to yourself a nice soft wife on a sofa with good fire and books and music perhaps.”

Beneath his lists, Darwin scrawled, “Marry, Marry, Marry QED.” And yet, Steven Johnson writes, in “Farsighted: How We Make the Decisions That Matter the Most,” “we have no evidence of how he actually weighed these competing arguments against each other.” Johnson, the author of “ How We Got to Now ” and other popular works of intellectual history, can’t help but notice the mediocrity of Darwin’s decision-making process. He points out that Benjamin Franklin used a more advanced pro-and-con technique: in what Franklin called “Prudential Algebra,” a numerical weight is assigned to each listed item, and counterbalancing items are then eliminated. (“If I find a Reason pro equal to some two Reasons con, I strike out the three . . . and thus proceeding I find at length where the Ballance lies,” Franklin explained to a friend.) Even this approach, Johnson writes, is slapdash and dependent upon intuition. “The craft of making farsighted choices—decisions that require long periods of deliberation, decisions whose consequences might last for years,” he concludes, “is a strangely under-appreciated skill.”

We say that we “decide” to get married, to have children, to live in particular cities or embark on particular careers, and in a sense this is true. But how do we actually make those choices? One of the paradoxes of life is that our big decisions are often less calculated than our small ones are. We agonize over what to stream on Netflix, then let TV shows persuade us to move to New York; buying a new laptop may involve weeks of Internet research, but the deliberations behind a life-changing breakup could consist of a few bottles of wine. We’re hardly more advanced than the ancient Persians, who, Herodotus says, made big decisions by discussing them twice: once while drunk, once while sober.

Johnson hopes to reform us. He examines a number of complex decisions with far-reaching consequences—such as the choice, made by President Barack Obama and his advisers, to green-light the raid on Osama bin Laden’s presumed compound, in Abbottabad, Pakistan—and then shows how the people in charge drew upon insights from “decision science,” a research field at the intersection of behavioral economics, psychology, and management. He thinks that we should apply such techniques to our own lives.

I’ve never had to decide whether to launch a covert raid on a suspected terrorist compound, but I’ve made my share of big decisions. This past summer, my wife and I had a baby boy. His existence suggests that, at some point, I decided to become a father. Did I, though? I never practiced any prudential algebra; rather than drawing up lists of pros and cons and concluding, on balance, that having kids was a good idea, I gradually and unintentionally transitioned from not particularly wanting children to wanting them, and from wanting them to joining my wife in having them. If I made a decision, it wasn’t a very decisive one. In “ War and Peace ,” Tolstoy writes that, while an armchair general may imagine himself “analyzing some campaign on a map” and then issuing orders, a real general never finds himself at “the beginning of some event”; instead, he is perpetually situated in the middle of a series of events, each a link in an endless chain of causation. “Can it be that I allowed Napoleon to get as far as Moscow?” Tolstoy’s General Kutuzov wonders. “When was it decided? Was it yesterday, when I sent Platov the order to retreat, or was it the evening before, when I dozed off and told Bennigsen to give the orders? Or still earlier?” Unlike the capture of Moscow by Napoleon, the birth of my son was a joyous occasion. Still, like Kutuzov, I’m at a loss to explain it: it’s a momentous choice, but I can’t pinpoint the making of it in space or time.

For Tolstoy, the tendency of big decisions to make themselves was one of the great mysteries of existence. It suggested that the stories we tell about our lives are inadequate to their real complexity. Johnson means to offer a way out of the Tolstoyan conundrum. He wants to make us writers, rather than readers, of our own stories. Doing so requires engaging with one of life’s fundamental questions: Are we in charge of the ways we change?

Ideally, we’d be omniscient and clearheaded. In reality, we make decisions in imperfect conditions that prevent us from thinking things through. This, Johnson explains, is the problem of “bounded rationality.” Choices are constrained by earlier choices; facts go undiscovered, ignored, or misunderstood; decision-makers are compromised by groupthink and by their own fallible minds. The most complex decisions harbor “conflicting objectives” and “undiscovered options,” requiring us to predict future possibilities that can be grasped, confusingly, only at “varied levels of uncertainty.” (The likelihood of marital quarrelling must somehow be compared with that of producing a scientific masterwork.) And life’s truly consequential choices, Johnson says, “can’t be understood on a single scale.” Suppose you’re offered two jobs: one at Partners in Health, which brings medical care to the world’s neediest people, and the other at Goldman Sachs. You must consider which option would be most appealing today, later this year, and decades from now; which would be preferable emotionally, financially, and morally; and which is better for you, your family, and society. From this multidimensional matrix, a decision must emerge.

Professional deciders, Johnson reports, use decision processes to navigate this complexity. Many of the best processes unfold in stages—a divergence stage might precede a convergence stage—and are undertaken by groups. (Darwin might have divided his friends into two opposing teams, in the divergence stage, and then held a debate between them.) The decision might be turned into an iterative adventure. In a series of meetings known as a “design charrette”—the concept is borrowed from the field of product design—a large problem is divided into subproblems, each of which is assigned to a group; the groups then present their work to the whole team, receive feedback, regroup, and revise, in a cycle that loops until a decision has been made. (For architects in nineteenth-century Paris, working en charrette meant revising until the very last minute, even in the cart on the way to deliver a design to a panel of judges.) Charrettes are useful not just because they break up the work but because they force groups with different priorities and sensibilities—coders and designers, architects and real-estate developers—to interact, broadening the range of available viewpoints.

At firms like Royal Dutch Shell, where growth requires investing in expensive ventures, such as ports, wells, and pipelines, deciders use “scenario planning” to imagine how such investments might play out. (A scenario-planning starter kit, Johnson writes, contains three possible futures: “You build one model where things get better, one where they get worse, and one where they get weird.”) Military planners use immersive war games, carried out in the field or around a table, to bring more of the “decision map” into view. In such games, our enemies discover possibilities that we can’t foresee, ameliorating the poverty of our individual imaginations. And since the games can be played over and over, they allow decision-makers to “rewind the tape,” exploring many branches of the “decision tree.”

It would be strange to stage a war game about a prospective marriage. Still, Johnson writes, decision science has lessons for us as individuals. Late in “Farsighted,” he recounts his own use of decision-scientific strategies to persuade his wife to move, with their two children, from New York City to the Bay Area. Johnson starts with intuitions—redwoods are beautiful; the tech scene is cool—but quickly moves beyond them. He conducts a “full-spectrum analysis,” arriving at various conclusions about what moving might mean financially, psychologically (will moving to a new city make him feel younger?), and existentially (will he want to have been “the kind of person who lived in one place for most of his adult life”?). Johnson summarizes his findings in a PowerPoint deck, then shows it to his wife, who raises objections that he hasn’t foreseen (all her friends live in Brooklyn). Eventually, they make a contract. They’ll move, but if after two years she wants to return to New York they’ll do so, “no questions asked”—a rewind.

Seven years later, they’re happy with a bicoastal existence. Would Johnson have benefitted from “conducting a multidisciplinary charrette” to explore his family’s move? Probably not. Still, he writes, the principles of decision science—“seeking out diverse perspectives on the choice, challenging your assumptions, making an explicit effort to map the variables”—constituted “a step up” from the pro-and-con lists that Franklin and Darwin would have made. Looking back on his decision, Johnson can at least feel confident that he made one.

Johnson’s book is part of a long tradition. For centuries, philosophers have tried to understand how we make decisions and, by extension, what makes any given decision sound or unsound, rational or irrational. “Decision theory,” the destination on which they’ve converged, has tended to hold that sound decisions flow from values. Faced with a choice—should we major in economics or in art history?—we first ask ourselves what we value, then seek to maximize that value.

From this perspective, a decision is essentially a value-maximizing equation. If you’re going out and can’t decide whether to take an umbrella, you could come to a decision by following a formula that assigns weights to the probability of rain, the pleasure you’ll feel in strolling unencumbered, and the displeasure you’ll feel if you get wet. Most decisions are more complex than this, but the promise of decision theory is that there’s a formula for everything, from launching a raid in Abbottabad to digging an oil well in the North Sea. Plug in your values, and the right choice pops out.

In recent decades, some philosophers have grown dissatisfied with decision theory. They point out that it becomes less useful when we’re unsure what we care about, or when we anticipate that what we care about might shift. In a 2006 article called “ Big Decisions: Opting, Converting, Drifting ,” the late Israeli philosopher Edna Ullmann-Margalit asked us to imagine being one of “the early socialist Zionist pioneers” who, at the turn of the twentieth century, dreamed of moving from Europe to Palestine and becoming “the New Jews of their ideals.” Such a change, she observed, “alters one’s life project and inner core”; one might speak of an “Old Person” who existed beforehand, browsing bookshops in Budapest, and a “New Person” who exists afterward, working a field in the desert. The point of such a move isn’t to maximize one’s values. It’s to reconfigure them, rewriting the equations by which one is currently living one’s life.

Ullmann-Margalit doubted that such transformative choices could be evaluated as sound or unsound, rational or irrational. She tells the story of a man who “hesitated to have children because he did not want to become the ‘boring type’ ” that parents tend to become. “Finally, he did decide to have a child and, with time, he did adopt the boring characteristics of his parent friends—but he was happy!” Whose values were maximized—Old Person’s or New Person’s? Because no value-maximizing formula could capture such a choice, Ullmann-Margalit suggested that, rather than describing this man as having “decided” to have children, we say that he “opted” to have them—“opting” (in her usage) being what we do when we shift our values instead of maximizing them.

The nature of “opting situations,” she thought, explains why people “are in fact more casual and cavalier in the way they handle their big decisions than in the way they handle their ordinary decisions.” Yet it’s our unexplored options that haunt us. A decision-maker who buys a Subaru doesn’t dwell on the Toyota that might have been: the Toyota doesn’t represent a version of herself with different values. An opter, however, broods over “the person one did not marry, the country one did not emigrate to, the career one did not pursue,” seeing, in the “shadow presence” implied by the rejected option, “a yardstick” by which she might evaluate “the worth, success or meaning” of her actual life.

One might hope that a little research could bridge the divide between Old Person and New Person. In a 2013 paper titled “ What You Can’t Expect When You’re Expecting ,” L. A. Paul, a philosopher at Yale, writes, “Perhaps you think that you can know what it’s like to have a child, even though you’ve never had one, because you can read or listen to the testimony of what it was like for others. You are wrong.” Paul cites the philosopher David Lewis, who proposed what might be called the Vegemite Principle: if you’ve never tasted Vegemite, a mysterious and beloved Australian “food spread” made from brewer’s yeast, then neither a description of what it’s like (black, gooey, vegetal) nor experience with other spreads (peanut butter, marmalade, Nutella) will suffice to tell you whether you’d like it. Similarly, Paul argues, “being around other people’s children isn’t enough to learn about what it will be like in your own case.” She explains:

Babysitting for other children, having nieces and nephews or much younger siblings—all of these can be wonderful (or horrible) experiences, but they are different in kind from having a child of your very own, perhaps roughly analogous to the way an original artwork has aesthetic value partly because of its origins. . . . Experience with other people’s children might teach you about what it is like to hold a baby, to change diapers or hold a bottle, but not what it is like to create, carry, give birth to and raise a child of your very own .

Before having children, you may enjoy clubbing, skydiving, and LSD; you might find fulfillment in careerism, travel, cooking, or CrossFit; you may simply relish your freedom to do what you want. Having children will deprive you of these joys. And yet, as a parent, you may not miss them. You may actually prefer changing diapers, wrangling onesies, and watching “Frozen.” These activities may sound like torture to the childless version of yourself, but the parental version may find them illuminated by love, and so redeemed. You may end up becoming a different person—a parent. The problem is that you can’t really know, in advance, what “being a parent” is like. For Paul, there’s something thrilling about this quandary. Why should today’s values determine tomorrow’s? In her 2014 book, “Transformative Experience,” she suggests that living “authentically” requires occasionally leaving your old self behind “to create and discover a new self.” Part of being alive is awaiting the “revelation” of “who you’ll become.”

In the months before our son was born, our sense of our ignorance mounted. “We don’t know what we’re waiting for,” my wife said. We knew in advance when he would be born—an ultrasound had revealed that he was unusually big, and a C-section had been scheduled—but the morning of his arrival unfolded with a strange familiarity. I had coffee, toasted an English muffin, and read the news; I packed clothes for the hospital into the bag that I take to work every day. At eleven, my wife and I got into the car. Her mother and a family friend drove us. At the front entrance, we hugged them goodbye.

Medusa is on a date with a man she doesn't realize has turned to stone.

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“Good luck!” my mother-in-law said. “Your lives are about to change forever!”

“Thanks,” I said. “Where are you guys going?”

“Costco,” she said.

We walked inside. Upstairs, in a curtained-off nook, my wife settled into a hospital bed. For about an hour, we made small talk with the nurses, who guessed at the baby’s weight, and with the surgeon, who happened to be a college classmate of ours. (“ Heyyyyy! ” she said when she arrived.) Occasionally we were left to ourselves. We held hands and looked at each other.

Eventually, an aide helped my wife into a wheelchair. Flanked by two nurses and wearing oversized scrubs, I pushed her down a long hallway toward the operating room. Inside, the doctors were listening to “Stairway to Heaven” on the radio. In the midst of it all, I admired Jimmy Page’s guitar solo. Afterward, I sat in the same hallway holding our baby. I had wondered if, meeting him for the first time, I would feel transformed. I felt like the same old me. And yet none of the words I knew matched the experience I was having. With my hands, I felt him breathing. Quiet and still, warm and awake, he watched me with dark-blue eyes—an actual new person.

Agnes Callard, a philosopher at the University of Chicago, is skeptical about the idea of sudden transformation. She’s also convinced that, no matter how it looks or feels, we choose how we change. In her often moving, quietly profound book “ Aspiration: The Agency of Becoming ,” she writes that “becoming a parent is neither something that just happens to you nor something you decide to have happen to you.” Instead, Callard maintains, we “aspire” to self-transformation by trying on the values that we hope one day to possess, just as we might strike a pose in the mirror before heading out on a date. Of the man in Ullmann-Margalit’s article who feared becoming a boring dad, Callard writes, “By the time he says, ‘Let’s go for it,’ he is actively trying to appreciate the values distinctive of parenthood.” In place of a moment of decision, Callard sees a more gradual process: “Old Person aspires to become New Person.”

Suppose that you sign up for a classical-music-appreciation class, in which your first assignment is to listen to a symphony. You put on headphones, press Play—and fall asleep. The problem is that you don’t actually want to listen to classical music; you just want to want to. Aspiring, Callard thinks, is a common human activity: there are aspiring wine lovers, art appreciators, sports fans, fashionistas, d.j.s, executives, alpinists, do-gooders, parents, and religious believers, all hatching plans to value new things. Many ordinary decisions, moreover—such as choosing between Goldman Sachs and Partners in Health—also touch on the question of who we aspire to become.

Callard distinguishes between aspiration and ambition. Some of the people taking the music-appreciation class are ambitious; they enrolled not because they aspire to love classical music but because the class is an easy A. From the first day, they know what they value: their grades. (“Turning ambition into aspiration is one of the job descriptions of any teacher,” Callard notes.) The ambitious students find it easy to explain why they’re taking the class. But the aspirants must grow comfortable with a certain quantity of awkward pretense. If someone were to ask you why you enrolled, you would be overreaching if you said that you were moved by the profound beauty of classical music. The truth, which is harder to communicate, is that you have some vague sense of its value, which you hope that some future version of yourself might properly grasp.

Until aspirants can fully explain their motivations, they often understate their aims. An aspiring painter will say that she finds painting relaxing rather than try to explain what she hopes to express through her art. An aspiration, Callard concludes, has two faces: a near face, which represents it “as lesser than it is,” and a distant one, which an aspirant is reluctant to describe, because it “ennobles her current activity beyond its rightful status.”

Being a well-meaning phony is key to our self-transformations. “Consider what kind of thinking motivates a good student to force herself to listen to a symphony when she feels herself dozing off,” Callard writes:

She reminds herself that her grade and the teacher’s opinion of her depend on the essay she will write about this piece; or she promises herself a chocolate treat when she gets to the end; or she’s in a glass-walled listening room of the library, conscious of other students’ eyes on her; or perhaps she conjures up a romanticized image of her future, musical self, such as that of entering the warm light of a concert hall on a snowy evening.

These are “bad” reasons for listening to classical music, Callard says, but “ ‘bad’ reasons are how she moves herself forward, all the while seeing them as bad, which is to say, as placeholders for the ‘real’ reason.”

When we’re aspiring, inarticulateness isn’t a sign of unreasonableness or incapacity. In fact, the opposite may be true. “Everyone goes to college ‘to become educated,’ ” Callard observes, “but until I am educated I do not really know what an education is or why it is important.” If we couldn’t aspire to changes that we struggle to describe, we’d be trapped within the ideas that we already have. Our inability to explain our reasons is a measure of how far we wish to travel. It’s only after an aspirant has reached her destination, Callard writes, that “she will say, ‘This was why.’ ”

Because aspirations take a long time to come to fruition, they’re always at risk of interruption. Ullmann-Margalit’s 2006 paper makes mention of someone who opts “to leave the corporate world in order to become an artist.” Callard sees that sort of move as the result of an aspiration—a process that starts small, perhaps with a random stroll through an art museum, and culminates, years later, after one opens a pottery studio. The trouble is that some values preclude others. An aspiring artist must reject the corporate virtues to which he once aspired and embrace creative ones in their place. If a family illness forces him to abandon his artistic plans, he may end up adrift—disenchanted with corporate life, but unable to grasp the real satisfactions of an artistic existence. To aspire, Callard writes, is to judge one’s present-day self by the standards of a future self who doesn’t yet exist. But that can leave us like a spider plant putting down roots in the air, hoping for soil that may never arrive.

Callard revisits Paul’s “What You Can’t Expect When You’re Expecting.” In that paper, Paul explored a strange consequence of the Vegemite Principle: if there’s no rational way to decide to have a child—because you can’t know what you’ve never experienced—then there’s also no rational reason for being disappointed about not having one. (Such disappointment isn’t “wrong, or blameworthy, or subjectively unreasonable,” Paul notes—just nonrational.) Callard disagrees. She sees infertility as a form of interrupted aspiration. An aspiring mother who can’t have children is rational in feeling sad, she writes, and “this is so even if—indeed, it is true in part because—she cannot quite see what she would be missing.”

Before we had our son, I began exploring the “near face” of being a parent. I noticed how cute babies and children could be and pictured our spare room as a nursery; I envisaged my wife and I taking our child to the beach near our house (my version of “entering the warm light of a concert hall on a snowy evening”). I knew that these imaginings weren’t the real facts about having children—clearly, there was more to having kids than cuteness. All the same, I had no way of grasping the “distant face” of fatherhood. It was something I aspired to know.

As it turned out, my wife and I had trouble having children. It took us five years to navigate the infertility maze. For much of that time, we lived with what Callard describes as the “distinctive kind of sadness appropriate to losing something you were only starting to try to get to know.” This sadness, Callard points out, has a complement in the disappointment one might feel after “having to abandon one’s educational aspirations for motherhood”: “The aspiring college student who must give up those dreams to raise a child is liable to feel that she was counting on the college experience to make her life meaningful.” Callard quotes from “Barren in the Promised Land,” a book about infertility by the historian Elaine Tyler May. “The grief—the loss,” a woman tells May. “I spent six years of my life trying to be a mom, and it was beyond my control. For a while I couldn’t look ahead. I thought, how do I define myself if I don’t do this? What am I if not a parent?” It might be easier if our biggest transformations were instantaneous, because then we wouldn’t need to live in states of aspiration. Certain of who we were, we’d never get stuck between selves.

I read “Aspiration” last spring, before my son was born, and I talked about it often with my wife. We were especially struck by Callard’s argument that parenthood is intrinsically aspirational. Parents look forward to a loving relationship with a specific person. And yet that person doesn’t pop into existence fully formed; he emerges, in all his specificity, over many years. For this reason, it makes little sense to be an “ambitious parent”—someone who plans, in advance, what he will love about his child. It’s better to “enter parenthood for the most inchoate of reasons,” Callard concludes, since that “puts our children in a position to fill out what parenthood means for us”; in turn, parental love must “be capable of molding itself to the personality that is, itself, coming to take a determinate shape.”

For the most part, Callard’s book is a systematic overview, situated outside the moment. Still, she writes, for aspirants “what happens in the meanwhile is also life.” Now that our son is here, we live entirely in the meanwhile. We don’t want the present, or its mystery, to end. Each day is absorbing and endlessly significant. Recently, I watched my father’s face as he watched my son’s. Later, we listened as my son learned a new kind of laugh. Each time he looks at us, he sees us more in his own way. Like pages that turn themselves, the meaningful instants follow one another too soon. It’s hard to think of them as stepping stones on the way to anywhere else. ♦

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By Jill Lepore

By Manvir Singh

Decision-Making: Choices and Results Essay

Decision-making is sometimes a complicated process where the best knowledge and understanding of all important factors is considered. The more informed a decision is, the better outcome will result. Picking one decision over another is related to the most benefit that a person wants to get.

A random act of indecision is based on a principle that someone else, sometimes a stranger, decides for you. The best way to accomplish this is to consult someone who has a certain amount of knowledge in the subject. As a social experiment, I decided to ask a computer store worker to choose a program for me, which best deals with my needs. My only preference rested on the kind of program, which related to my field of work. The general requirement was that it must be a program used for writing articles and short stories. The store worker asked me if it had to be a program for a PC, notebook, or IPad. I own a notebook, so I answered which devise I have. He then started offering programs, which differed in layout and functions. I explained to the man that he is the one who has to pick a certain program and I will be satisfied by his own opinion and understanding of what is best. He was somewhat surprised, as people often say what they need specifically. After about 5 minutes of browsing through several programs, he selected one that was called Professional Writing for Pros. When I got home and tried the program, I was very pleased with the decision. Potentially, this way of making a choice is surprising and useful, in cases when there is not much information known about the subject. It was very efficient to let someone more knowledgeable make the decision, as I did not have to spend extra time and effort in familiarizing myself with the subject and make the selection on my own. Another decision that was taken for me was at the local restaurant. Usually, I pick something that I have tried before, so I know what kind of taste it will have. But this time, I let the person sitting next to me choose my meal. I only asked that it be something extravagant, not a usual, everyday selection. The lady started thinking and then was joined by her brother and father. The three of them had a quick recall of foods that they previously had, which were unusual to them. In the end, they came up with a choice of 2 things. One was octopus and the other was a shark’s fin soup. The father and his daughter were recommending octopus because shark’s fin soup has recently become known for its inhumane treatment of sharks. The fishermen would only use the fins and dispose of the rest of the shark. So, their choice was octopus and I was ready to try it. I have never tried octopus before and to say the truth, had a somewhat negative predisposition towards the taste. But the octopus was nicely cooked and had a side order of a seafood salad. I was very glad that I finally tried it because it was delicious. The family stayed several extra minutes to see my reaction and they were happy that I liked it. This sort of decision-making becomes a very positive experience. I believe that people should do this at least sometimes, as it is much unexpected and surprisingly easy.

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Essays on Decision Making

Decision making is a crucial skill that affects every aspect of our lives, from choosing what to eat for breakfast to making major life-changing choices. That's why writing an essay about decision making is so important - it helps us understand the process and improve our skills in this area.

When it comes to choosing a topic for your decision making essay, the possibilities are endless. You could focus on the psychology behind decision making, the impact of decision making on personal relationships, or the role of decision making in leadership. The key is to choose a topic that interests you and allows for meaningful exploration.

For an argumentative essay on decision making, you could explore the pros and cons of different decision making models, the ethical implications of certain decisions, or the impact of group dynamics on decision making. If you're more interested in cause and effect, you could examine the consequences of specific decisions, the factors that influence decision making, or the relationship between decision making and risk-taking.

If you prefer to share your opinion, you could write an opinion essay on the best decision making strategies, the most difficult decisions you've had to make, or the role of intuition in decision making. And for those who want to inform and educate, an informative essay on decision making could cover decision making biases, decision making in the workplace, or the science of decision making.

For example, if you're writing an argumentative essay on the impact of decision making on personal relationships, you could start by stating your thesis: "Effective decision making is essential for maintaining healthy relationships." Then, you could provide examples of how decision making can either strengthen or weaken relationships, backed up by research and personal experiences.

In the of your decision making essay, you could set the stage by discussing the importance of decision making in everyday life and providing a brief overview of the topics you'll be covering. In the , you could summarize your key points and leave the reader with some food for thought, such as the importance of making conscious, well-informed decisions.

So, whether you're writing an argumentative, cause and effect, opinion, or informative essay on decision making, there are plenty of topics and examples to explore. Good luck with your essay!

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3 Ways to Improve Your Decision Making

Walter Frick

First, be less certain — about everything.

To get better at making decisions, you have to improve your ability to make predictions (how different choices change the likelihood of different outcomes) and your judgment (how desirable each of those outcomes is). While there are countless ways to work on these two skills, there are three simple rules that can help the most. First, be less certain. We’re all more confident about each step of the decision-making process than we ought to be. What else would you think about if you were less sure that A would cause B, or that B is preferable to C? Second, always ask yourself ask “How often does that typically happen?” If you think outcome B is preferable to outcome C, you might ask: How often has that historically been the case? Third, brush up on your understanding of probability. Research has shown that even basic training in probability makes people better forecasters and helps them avoid certain cognitive biases.

To make a good decision, you need to have a sense of two things: how different choices change the likelihood of different outcomes and how desirable each of those outcomes is. In other words, as Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans, and Avi Goldfarb have written , decision making requires both prediction and judgment.

Walter Frick is a contributing editor at Harvard Business Review , where he was formerly a senior editor and deputy editor of HBR.org. He is the founder of Nonrival , a newsletter where readers make crowdsourced predictions about economics and business. He has been an executive editor at Quartz as well as a Knight Visiting Fellow at Harvard’s Nieman Foundation for Journalism and an Assembly Fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. He has also written for The Atlantic , MIT Technology Review , The Boston Globe , and the BBC, among other publications.

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Decision-Making

Reviewed by Psychology Today Staff

Chocolate or strawberry? Life or death? We make some choices quickly and automatically, relying on mental shortcuts our brains have developed over the years to guide us in the best course of action. Understanding strategies such as maximizing vs. satisficing , fast versus slow thinking, and factors such as risk tolerance and choice overload, can lead to better outcomes.

The Art of Decision-Making
How to Make Good Decisions
Avoiding Bad Decisions

When making a decision, we form opinions and choose actions via mental processes which are influenced by biases, reason, emotions, and memories. The simple act of deciding supports the notion that we have free will . We weigh the benefits and costs of our choice, and then we cope with the consequences. Factors that limit the ability to make good decisions include missing or incomplete information, urgent deadlines, and limited physical or emotional resources.

When people are put in a familiar situation, their decisions are often fast and automatic , based on longtime experience with what works and what doesn’t. However, when encountering a situation they’ve never been in before, they have to take time to weigh the potential benefits and risks when choosing a course of action. They are more likely to make mistakes and face negative consequences.

The ability to think critically is key to making good decisions without succumbing to common errors or bias . This means not just going with your gut, but rather figuring out what knowledge you lack and obtaining it. When you look at all possible sources of information with an open mind, you can make an informed decision based on facts rather than intuition .

A satisficing approach to making decisions involves settling for a good-enough outcome, even if it’s flawed. A maximizing approach, on the other hand, waits for conditions to be as perfect as possible to minimize potential risks. People who make good decisions know when it’s important to act immediately, and when there’s time to wait and gather more facts before making their choice.

How do we choose between two or more options that seem equally appealing on the surface? Decision-making usually involves a mixture of intuition and rational thinking; critical factors, including personal biases and blind spots, are often unconscious , which makes decision-making hard to fully operationalize, or get a handle on.

However, there are steps to ensure that people make consistently excellent choices, including gathering as much information as possible, considering all the possible alternatives, as well as their attendant benefits and costs, and taking the time to sleep on weightier decisions.

In life, there is often no “right” decision. When surrounded by an abundance of options, it’s easy to experience decision paralysis or feel less satisfied with your decisions. You may even blame yourself when really you are going through “choice overload.” The key is to find ways to simplify your decision and not ruminate over the many roads not taken.

Decision-making can be stressful , and follow-through is essential. You may need to accept that panic , fear , and lack of self-confidence are often part of the decision-making process. It’s crucial to get enough sleep, so you can think clearly. Try to keep your priorities straight. Carefully weigh the trade-offs, commit to a decision, and then follow through on it.

Slow down the decision-making process to prevent impulsive choices. Be aware of common sales strategies like nudges and the decoy effect, which introduces a trick option to get individuals to make a certain decision. Gather as much information as you can, and don’t allow the desires of others to dictate your decision.

The field of behavioral economics demonstrated that people are not always rational when it comes to decision making. Fortunately, most personal and professional choices have few or no long-term, negative consequences. However, sometimes a person has to make a decision that will have a profound impact on their future—from who they marry to where they live to how they manage their professional career . In these cases, it’s important to avoid the common pitfalls that can lead to poor decision-making. These can include doing too little or too much research, mistaking opinions for facts, decision fatigue, a failure to learn from past errors, and more.

Don’t try to make the decision you would make, or railroad them into simply acting quickly if they are vacillating about an important matter. Rather, help them cultivate qualities of mind that will serve beyond just this moment, and encourage them to think through their options by simply and respectfully asking questions.

There are two types of rationalization that people commonly engage in: prospective and retrospective. Prospective rationalizing refers to rationalizing a decision before making it, whereas retrospective rationalizing refers to rationalizing a decision after the fact.

In the 2000s, Barry Schwarz coined the phrase the paradox of choice to describe the fact that American consumers have so many choices from which to choose that they often waste time and mind-space second-guessing themselves and comparing trivial differences.

When a large number of people are involved in making a decision, the process can be usurped by groupthink . Groupthink is when well-intentioned individuals make poor or irrational choices out of a desire to conform or avoid dissent. As a result, group members may feel pressured to ignore ethical considerations and refrain from expressing natural doubts and concerns.

People create expectations to anticipate what may happen, but these approximations are compromises with actuality; in ongoing relationships, people compromise to create mutuality.

How well do scientists know how effectively they apply research ethics? Probably not so well, but that should come as no surprise.

Artificial intelligence already plays a role in deciding who’s getting hired. The way to improve AI is very similar to how we fight human biases.

We live in a society that supports the dogma: choice is freedom, and freedom is happiness. Here's why that isn't exactly accurate.

Helping your child select a college was just the beginning. Now, your role is to support their success.

Teenagers are prone to overreacting to everything because of their developmental state.

Personal Perspective: As a therapist, do you have an agenda for your clients? Are you nudging them to "make the right choice"? What impact might it have on their process?

Don't assume you're a great decision-maker until you understand the potential power of the trilogy of errors. Understanding it is the first step.

The 3 Ps can cause us to grind to a halt and fail to accomplish our goals. However, there are steps we can take to avoid this vicious cycle.

Just because procrastination can be a coping strategy doesn’t make it a good excuse or mean that it’s an adaptive coping mechanism. Developing better strategies is vital.

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Custom essay help for you, advice for a decision making essay.

It is difficult to make decisions sometimes, but it is even more challenging to write a decision making essay. Therefore, to help you with this tough task we offer you a few hints on what to write about in your essay about decision making.

Importance of the Proper Making Decisions Process

The good decision defines your success. Thus, you should better learn more on critical thinking and decision making, as this information and skills will help you a lot in your life. Being well-aware of how to find effective solutions will help you to avoid failures and manage your time without any losses.

Decision Making Essay: Explain the Process

A good decision is not always easy to get. To do everything properly, one needs to follow the next steps:

1. You Should Identify the Problem You Are Dealing with

It is necessary to find out, what you are actually dealing with. State the case you need to get a decision for.

2. Search for Information

To make sure what you are fully aware of the issue, gather more information about it. You should benefit from the online and offline sources.

3. Analyze the Situation

Now you should think of the conditions of the situation that actually takes place. Analyze all the factors, which influence it and put it into logical connections with other situations.

4. Develop the Possible Solutions

It is high time to think what can be done. Note all the possible solutions that need to be reviewed.

5. Critically Evaluate the Options

You should think of the pluses and minuses of each possible solution you have found. This will make you close to actual making a final decision. You can draw a simple table for an each option. There should be 4 columns: strength, weakness, opportunities and threats of the option. This is known to be a SWOT analysis, which is widely used in Business Studies, Finance etc.

6. Select the Best Option

There is the best plan of actions among the suggested ones, so choose the one based on your analysis. Obviously, the best option is the one that has the most pluses and the least minuses if to compare with others. This will be your way to resolve the situation.

7. Act!

Making a decision without acting is pointless. Thus, proceed to the most important step of the whole process and apply the solution in practice!

Options to Get Helped in Decision Making

Sometimes we need some help in decision making. Indeed, it is a good idea to discuss the issue with a person, who is an expert in the field you need to deal with.

Act in Groups

Having a group of experts in various fields helps a lot, since you can fully overview the issue and be aware of all the difficulties faced. Every group member is able to express his own opinion on the situation and provide an in-depth analysis from the point of view he is professional in.

Discuss the Problem with an Expert

There is a point to talk to the expert directly. Our company has a numerous team of experts in different fields, so we will definitely find an appropriate helper for you. Your assistant will not only help you to make the best possible decision, but he is always ready to write a good and qualitative decision making essay.

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Essay on Making Decisions

Students are often asked to write an essay on Making Decisions in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Making Decisions

Understanding decision making.

Decision making is choosing between two or more options. It’s like picking between chocolate or vanilla ice cream for dessert. You think about which one you like more, and then you choose.

The Importance of Decision Making

Making decisions is important because it helps us move forward in life. Decisions like what to study, what job to take, or where to live shape our future. Just like choosing the right path in a maze, good decisions help us reach our goals faster.

Steps in Making Decisions

Making decisions involves several steps. First, we identify the options. Second, we evaluate each option. It’s like weighing the pros and cons. Third, we choose the best option. Lastly, we act on our decision.

Challenges in Decision Making

Sometimes, making decisions can be tough. It’s like standing at a crossroads, not sure which way to go. We may fear making the wrong choice or disappointing others. But remember, it’s okay to make mistakes. They help us learn and grow.

Improving Decision Making

To make better decisions, we can gather more information, ask for advice, and think about possible outcomes. It’s like doing homework before a big test. The more prepared we are, the better our decisions will be.

250 Words Essay on Making Decisions

What is decision making.

Decision making is a process where you choose one option from many. It is like picking one ice cream flavor from many choices. It is an important skill in life. We make decisions every day, like what to wear or what to eat.

Types of Decisions

There are two types of decisions: big and small. Small decisions are easy, like choosing a pencil color. Big decisions are harder, like choosing a school subject.

Steps in Decision Making

There are four steps to make a good decision. First, know what you have to decide. Second, think of all the options. Third, think about the good and bad points of each option. Fourth, choose the option that has more good points.

Importance of Decision Making

Making decisions is important because it helps us in life. It helps us choose the right things. It also helps us solve problems.

In conclusion, decision making is a key part of life. It is like a compass that guides us. So, we should learn to make good decisions. Remember, even if you make a wrong decision, it is okay. You can always learn from it and make a better decision next time.

500 Words Essay on Making Decisions

Making decisions is a part of our daily life. It is the act of choosing between two or more possibilities. Simple decisions can be what clothes to wear, what food to eat, or which route to take to school. More complex decisions can be about choosing a career path or making a big purchase like a house or a car.

The Importance of Making Decisions

Decisions are important because they shape our lives. Every choice we make can lead us down a different path. For example, deciding to study hard can lead to good grades, which can open up more opportunities for us in the future. On the other hand, deciding not to study can lead to poor grades, which might limit our options. So, decisions, big or small, can have a big impact on our lives.

Making a decision is not always easy. It can be tough when the decision is important or when there are many choices. Here are some steps that can help:

1. Identify the decision: The first step is to understand what decision needs to be made. What is the problem or challenge that needs to be solved?

2. Gather Information: Once the decision is clear, the next step is to gather information about the different options. This could involve reading, asking others for advice, or doing some research.

3. Consider the options: After gathering information, it’s time to think about the different options. What are the pros and cons of each choice?

4. Make the decision: After considering all the options, it’s time to make the decision. Choose the option that seems best.

5. Take action: Once the decision is made, it’s time to act on it. This means doing whatever is needed to make the decision a reality.

6. Review the decision: After some time, it’s good to look back and think about the decision. Was it a good choice? If not, what can be learned for next time?

In conclusion, making decisions is a crucial skill in life. It involves understanding the problem, gathering information, considering the options, making the choice, taking action, and reviewing the decision. While it can be tough, practicing these steps can make decision making easier and lead to better outcomes in life. So, the next time you’re faced with a decision, remember these steps and make the best choice you can.

That’s it! I hope the essay helped you.

If you’re looking for more, here are essays on other interesting topics:

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What Leads to Bad Decision-Making

Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."

Amy Morin, LCSW, is a psychotherapist and international bestselling author. Her books, including "13 Things Mentally Strong People Don't Do," have been translated into more than 40 languages. Her TEDx talk, "The Secret of Becoming Mentally Strong," is one of the most viewed talks of all time.

Mental Shortcuts

Poor comparisons, optimism bias.

Other Factors

How to Make Better Decisions

Frequently asked questions.

People make thousands of decisions each and every day, some big and some small. While some of these choices turn out great, chances are that not every decision you make will be a good one.

When you look back, you may wonder why you made those decisions , particularly the ones that turned out poorly or led to feelings of regret. While it goes without saying that you will probably continue to make bad decisions from time to time, you can gain a deeper understanding of the process behind these sometimes irrational choices.

Many factors contribute to poor choices. Understanding how these processes work and influence your thinking may help you to make better decisions in the future.

If you had to think through every possible scenario for every possible decision, you probably wouldn't get much done in a day. In order to make decisions quickly and economically, your brain relies on a number of cognitive shortcuts known as heuristics .

What Are Heuristics?

Heuristics are mental rules or shortcuts that allow you to make judgments quite quickly and oftentimes quite accurately. But they can also lead to fuzzy thinking and poor decisions.

One example is the anchoring bias . In many situations, people use an initial starting point as an anchor and then adjust it to yield a final estimate. For example, if you are buying a house and you know that homes in your target neighborhood typically sell for an average price of $375,000, you will probably use that figure to negotiate the purchase price of the home you choose.

In a classic experiment by researchers Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, participants were asked to spin a wheel of fortune that offered a number between 0 and 100. The participants were then asked to guess how many African countries belonged to the United Nations. Those who had gotten a high number on the wheel of fortune were more likely to guess that there were many African countries in the U.N., while those who had gotten a lower number were likely to give a much lower estimate.

Becoming more aware of how heuristics impact choices can help you avoid making bad decisions.

For example, you can combat the anchoring bias by coming up with a range of possible estimates. So if you are buying a new car, come up with a range of reasonable prices rather than focusing on the overall average price of a particular vehicle.

Comparison is one tool that people use when making decisions. Because you know what things typically cost, you can compare options to select the best price. You assign value based on how items compare to other things.

But what happens when you make poor comparisons? Or when the items you compare your options to are not representative or equal? For example, how far out of your way would you go to save $25?

If you could save $25 on a $75 item by driving 15 minutes out of your way, you would probably do it. But if you could save $25 off a $10,000 item, would you still be willing to go out of your way to save the money? Even though both examples involve the same amount of savings, in most cases, people are less willing to travel further to save money on the more expensive item.

This is an example of faulty comparison. Since you are comparing the amount you save to the amount you pay, $25 seems like much greater savings when compared against a $75 item than when contrasted with a $10,000 item.

When making decisions, people often make rapid comparisons without thinking about their options.

To avoid making bad decisions, relying on logic and thoughtful examination of the options can sometimes be more important than relying on your immediate "gut reaction."

Surprisingly, people tend to have a natural-born optimism that can hamper good decision-making. In one study, researcher Tali Sharot asked participants what they thought the chances were of many unpleasant events, including being robbed or getting a terminal illness. After the people made predictions, the researchers told them the actual probabilities.

When people are told that the risk of something bad happening is lower than expected, they tend to adjust their predictions to match the new information they learned. When they discover that the risk of something bad happening is much higher than estimated, they tend to ignore the new information.

For example, if a person predicts that the odds of dying from smoking cigarettes is only 5%, but is then told that the real risk of dying is closer to 25%, they will likely ignore the new information and stick with their initial estimate.

Part of this overly optimistic outlook stems from a natural tendency to believe that bad things happen to others but not us. When people hear about something tragic or unpleasant happening to another person, they often look for things the person might have done to cause the problem. This tendency to blame the victims protects people from admitting that they are just as susceptible to tragedy as anyone else.

Sharot refers to this as the optimism bias , or our tendency to overestimate the likelihood of experiencing good events while underestimating the likelihood of experiencing bad events. She suggests that this isn't necessarily a matter of believing that things will magically fall into place, but instead overconfidence in our abilities to make good things happen.

Because you might be overly optimistic about your abilities and prospects, you are more likely to believe that your decisions are the best.

Experts might warn that smoking, being sedentary, or eating too much sugar can kill, but the optimism bias leads people to believe that it mostly kills other people, not them.

Get Advice From The Verywell Mind Podcast

This episode of The Verywell Mind Podcast shares a tip that can help you make better decisions.

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Other Reasons for Bad Decision-Making

Several other factors can contribute to poor choices. Both good and bad decisions are susceptible to influences including:

Automatic thinking : People sometimes engage in actions almost on autopilot without giving them much thought, particularly when performing routine tasks. This automatic thinking can save time and cognitive resources, but can sometimes lead to poor choices.
Cognitive biases : People are prone to systematic cognitive errors that bias how they process and interpret information. Such biases also affect the type of judgments and decisions that they make.
Individual differences : Factors such as age and socioeconomic status can also impact the choices people make. Older people may make different choices than younger people for various reasons, and the options open to people often depend on the financial resources available to them.
Past experiences : The choices people are often very influenced by the experiences that they have had in the past. In many cases, they might base their choices on things that worked previously.
Multitasking : Trying to juggle too much at once can have cognitive costs, making poor decisions more likely.
Decision fatigue : The many decisions people make each day can take a toll, creating stress that often leads to decision fatigue . This fatigue can lead people to choose randomly or let others choose when they are faced with a choice.

Limited attentional and cognitive resources can contribute to bad decision-making. Past experiences, individual factors, biases, and fatigue can also play a part.

While some of the factors that lead to bad decision-making are difficult to eliminate, there are steps that you can take to help make better choices. Some strategies that can be helpful:

Prioritize important decisions . This can combat decision fatigue and ensure you have the necessary cognitive resources to make the best choices.
Eliminate distractions . If many different things compete for your attention, you're less likely to have the time, energy, and attention to focus on the available information and choices.
Consider all of the options . While it might save time to just focus on the most obvious choice, weighing all the options might help you make a better decision.
Take a break and come back later . It's easy to get overwhelmed, especially when making a complex or important decision. Take a break and give yourself some time so you can come back to it with a fresh eye.
Ask for outside input . Talking to other people can be a great way to get different perspectives on the situation.

A Word From Verywell

While it is impossible to make perfect choices all of the time, there are strategies you can use to help minimize bad decision-making. Being aware of some of the many factors that contribute to bad decisions is one of the best ways to become a better decision-maker.

The areas of the brain that help regulate behavior and control decisions are not fully developed until people reach early adulthood. Because of this, teens tend to respond impulsively without fully considering the consequences of their choices.

While you can't force someone to change their mind, you can act as a positive influence. You might start by asking them to take a break and consider other options before making up their mind. Encourage them to talk to someone else if they struggle with a decision. If they persist with their poor decision, focus on being empathetic and forgiving while gently encouraging them to make better choices going forward.

Instead of ruminating over feelings of regret , focus on practicing self-acceptance. Forgive yourself for your mistake, accept that regret is sometimes a part of life, and focus on what you can learn from the mistake. Using those lessons to help you make better decisions can help you reframe your regrets so that you feel grateful for your good choices and appreciative of the lessons you have learned.

Confirmation bias is a type of cognitive bias in which people favor information that confirms their existing beliefs. This bias leads people to ignore data that contradict their current thinking, contributing to distorted perceptions of reality. Instead of basing decisions on all of the facts, confirmation bias leads people to base their choices on limited, biased information.

Bobadilla-Suarez S, Love BC. Fast or frugal, but not both: Decision heuristics under time pressure. J Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cogn . 2018;44(1):24-33. doi:10.1037/xlm0000419

Tversky A, Kahneman D. Judgment under uncertainty: Heuristics and biases . Science . 1974;185(4157):1124-1131. doi:10.1126/science.185.4157.1124

Sharot T, Korn C, Dolan RJ. How unrealistic optimism is maintained in the face of reality Nature Neurosci . 2011;14(11):1475-9. doi : 10.1038/nn.2949

Bedwell SA. Do teenagers really make bad decisions ? Front Young Minds . 2017;5:53. doi:10.3389/frym.2017.00053

By Kendra Cherry, MSEd Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."

Home / Essay Samples / Business / Decision Making / Making Informed Choices: the Importance of Decision Making

Making Informed Choices: the Importance of Decision Making

Category: Life , Business , Education
Topic: Decision , Decision Making , Personal Statement

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