Making a choice is fundamental to behavior. It fundamentally involves comparison.
Reasoned vs automatic
It may involve simulation, possibly with explicit verbal reasoning to various degrees.
Preset Preferences
Decisions not involving explicit reasoning are made using set preferences. Some preferences are formed due to developmental environment; while some tastes are acquired consciously due to habit formation. Right from the womb, the human baby learns the rhythm of its mother’s language, the taste of food she ingests; and adapts its behavior upon being born.
Efficacy
In highly complex environments with many data-points (including in the case of automatic procedures/ skills), automatically made decisions are shown to be better than explicitly reasoned decisions.
vs Awareness of decision
MRI scans show that a decision is reached around 0.25s before the awareness of deciding. So, these are two separate things.
Reasoning concepts
Explicit reasoning behind decisions shows some common patterns and concepts.
Identity
This plays a major role in both reasoning leading to decisions and explanatory models. Identity itself is described elsewhere.
The Hindu ranking/ classification of goals into dharma, artha and kAma is considered elsewhere.
Fudge factor
People allow themselves to cheat/ deviate from self-image just a little bit.
Effect of moral reminders
Atheists trying to remember 10 commandments experiment, and not cheating at all in subsequent tasks.
If people watch someone outside their group cheating, their cheating went down. In general, when reminded about morality, cheating becomes less. If people watch someone from their own group cheating, they are more comfortable with cheating.
Opportunity cost
What is the cost of exploiting an opportunity? You could be loosing out on the chance to pursue other opportunities.
Tabulation
Tabulation is a very common and useful tool for comparing multiple alternatives. They enable comparison of alternatives along various dimensions. One can then assign various weights (implicitly or explicitly) to different features, thereby identifying the features relevant for comparison and simplifying the decision problem.
\experience{One can use tabulation to compare various alternative actions, using features like dharma, artha and kAma.}
Comparison with past evaluations
Comparing with past evalutations, rather than considering what is possible, to evaluate value of an outcome is a mistake. To check if price for an item is fair, ask “what other things you could do with the same money?”, not “What was this item worth yesterday?”.
General Properties
Action-choices
Loss aversion
Loss hurts much more than gains make you happy.
Immediate gratification bias
Aka anti-delayed gratification bias. If the same gratification is offered after a slight delay, people undervalue that option. To counter thus, one must imagine the future more vividly.
General comparison
Influence of history
Comparison with professed evaluations of others is also misleading. “The subjects consistently reported that the more expensive wines tasted better, even when they were actually identical to cheaper wines.” That they actually feel greater pleasure in their brain has been confirmed by the use of MRI.
Relativity bias
Evaluating two houses side by side yields different results than evaluating three — A, B and a somewhat less appealing version of A. The subpar A makes it easier to decide that A is better — not only better than the similar one, but better than B.
Comparing skill/ ability
Illusory superiority/ inferiority
People with below average skill may wrongly think that they have above-average skills/ intellect etc.; this fallacy is often due to misjudging one’s skills arising from one’s poor understanding of the skill.
However, having consciously developed a certain skill, people often underestimate the goodness of their skills in relation to others - this often is due to the fact that others’ skills are misjudged as being high by one who is very aware of one’s own shortcomings.
Personality-attribution error
We often think that our success is heavily due to our qualities, while failure is due to adverse circumstances. But, we think the very opposite of other people. This can be parly seen as a combination of the confirmation bias and the ‘illusory superiority’ effect.
Underestimation of luck, circumstances
The planning fallacy is failing to think realistically about where one fits in the distribution of people. In irregular environments, luck and circumstance matters more than skills. Eg: Stock market, leadership tests.
Quality depletion
Aka Ego depletion.
The more the number of decisions one makes, the less one is willing to consider deeply when making more decisions.
Food with glucose seems to temporarily increase/ restore decision making capacity and enthusiasm.
Examples
This is exploited by car sellers and fast food chains which offer a huge variety of choices, so that the taxed brain resorts to simply picking default options, after making a few choices. Also, Israeli judges were more likely to grant parole in the morning than in the afternoon. Also, in they were more likely to grant parole after being given glucose rich food.