How Decision Science can save your life.
Decisions can change your life. Decision Science can help.
We humans need to get serious about how we make decisions. Because we’re running out of time.
We are in a critical moment in human history. You feel it, right? Social polarization is intense. Important political institutions seem fragile. The environment is hurting. Mental health is at an all-time low.
Plus I’m tired of other people - many of them strangers - messing with my head, messing with my life. You feel the same. I know it. I see it on TikTok every freaking day.
Something big has to happen. Like a paradigm shift. Which is why I’m saying we need to get serious about how we make our choices. Because decisions got us to where we are, and decisions can get us to where we want to go. And one decision… your next decision… can turn it all around.
Decisions are powerful.
A lot of our hardships are due to poor decision-making. Marry the wrong person, and you won’t be happy. Choose the wrong career, and you could be miserable. Buy the wrong home and you could live with regret for years.
A lot of us live with a lot of regret.
Some of our struggles and successes we owe to other people’s decisions. Our parents’ choices can make or break our lives. Teachers and bosses make choices each day that determine where we end up. Politicians and business leaders across the globe shape our circumstances and constrain our options.
The choices of people long dead also leave marks. Your parents’ parents’ parents made decisions about where to live and what to do for a living, the consequences of which have created the options available to you today. The political and economic systems that shape your reality are a product of choices made centuries ago. The state of our climate? That didn’t happen overnight. Old decisions are largely responsible for this too.
A lot of people (including us) have made bad choices, and those choices have put a lot of us in bad situations. Decisions are that powerful.
But if we make good choices… if we commit to taking decision-making seriously and doing it well… we can fix what isn’t working and live better lives. We can be happier individuals living on a happier planet.
Decisions are that powerful.
We can’t wing it.
Humans aren’t wired to make good decisions a lot of the time. Our brains are part of the issue: they crave efficiency because they need to save energy (they take up 2% of our body mass but burn 20% of our fuel). Efficiency is great, but it causes us to jump to conclusions with insufficient information. It forces us to assume things that aren’t true. It drives us to take shortcuts we can’t afford to take.
Every upside comes with a downside.
Our feelings also drive us into poor decision-making. We can be impulsive when we need to slow down and think. We make choices to feel better even when the outcomes are terrible. We can’t ignore our emotions: they give us valuable information about how we’re doing. But every upside comes with a downside.
Our social environments also impact us. We choose options that aren’t good for us in order to belong. In order to not stand out. In order to convince ourselves and others that we’re valuable. We can’t ignore our social world: we are social creatures by nature, and we can’t survive without other people. But every upside comes with a downside.
The downsides get in our way more often than we are aware, which means that when it comes to making decisions, we can’t wing it. We have to take this shit seriously. We have to look to the science.
Decision science can help.
Decision science is the study of human decision making. It involves two major components: analysis of information that allows for ideal decision-making; and the study of how people actually make decisions, which isn’t often good.
In business or public policy (where most decision scientists work), decision scientists gather data, crunch numbers, and do fancy statistics to determine things like how risky a choice is, whether the pros of a decision outweigh the cons, how possible it is for an option to even happen, and so on. These types of analyses are sophisticated, making them tough for most to grasp.
But the principles underlying these analyses aren’t hard to understand, especially when they’re explained in a simple way. Once you get the hang of them, you can apply them to your everyday life to make better choices about pretty much everything, from which car to buy to whether or not you should dump your partner, quit your job, move to another city, and become a social media influencer.
Half of my work’s mission is to simplify complex decision science analyses so you can benefit from them. So you can apply them to your everyday choices. So you can live a better life.
The second half of my work’s mission is to simplify and share research on decision behavior, to explain why we humans mess up our decisions so we can find ways to do it better. This includes an examination of the cognitive biases and mental shortcuts (called heuristics) that cause us to draw inaccurate conclusions about the world. The kinds of conclusions that force us to dive headfirst into bad choices.
If you’re familiar with behavioral economics, then you’re familiar with what I’m talking about.
But behavioral economists aren’t the only experts on decision behavior. Neuroscientists have learned a ton about how the brain makes choices. Researchers in psychology have too. Sociologists have discovered a lot of interesting things about how our social environments push and pull us into bad decisions - and how our decisions then shape those same social environments that constrain us. Even researchers in medicine and physiology have insights to share about how things like hormones can impact our choices.
Decision science can change your life.
Knowing how decision-making goes wrong - and how to get it right - can turn your life around.
For example, according to the science, we humans too often rush into decisions believing we have enough information when we really don’t. Our brains trick us into believing we know enough. Our social environments make it easy to assume the same. So, without realizing it, we go with options we wouldn’t choose if we only knew more.
Like… I wouldn’t have chosen to move in with my first serious boyfriend if I’d known what a weed head he was. After we moved in, he quit his job. He never helped around the house. He just got high and played video games all day. Should I have known, before moving in with him, that he’d be such a drain? Maybe. Maybe not. Point is, I didn’t even try to know. He and I were always together anyway, and living together meant sharing one rent. That was all my fast-moving brain told me I needed to know.
Another major decision-making flaw is doing what people around us do. The other night I drank four strong cocktails and regretted it the next day. I did it because the person I went out with had about eight IPAs. I’m not making an excuse; I’m just saying. According to the research, other people influence us without our realizing it. We influence other people as well. My drinking buddy may have had five beers if I had stopped at two drinks. Who knows who was influencing whom? What I do know is that if you change who you spend time with, your choices can change too. For better or worse.
Knowing these glitches in decision-making - and remembering them when it counts - can help us override urges to decide too hastily (or too impulsively, or too lazily). It can also provide decision analysts (like myself) the right insight for creating decision-making blueprints that can save us all from regret, disappointment, hardship.
Own your decisions.
We are in a critical moment in human history. I know you feel it.
A lot is at stake, and too many things feel shaky. Too many of us struggle with anxiety and depression. Too many of us feel hopeless if not unfulfilled.
Big problems don’t always require big solutions. Sometimes all you have to do is decide better than how your human design wants you to decide. You can own your choices, override the natural human tendencies that hold you back, and create a better life for yourself.
You can turn it around. Yes, you. Decisions are that powerful. All you have to do is choose to own it.