How We Sometimes Fool Ourselves When Making Decisions, Part One

How We Sometimes Fool Ourselves When Making Decisions*

Think back on a crucial decision you’ve made in your work or with a loved one that haunts you still. 

Now, consider some smaller decisions where you realize in retrospect that, if you’d made another choice, you’d have saved a situation, time, “face”, a relationship, money or another resource, or simply avoided aggravation. 

What if you found out that your mind played tricks on you? 
You could have thought things out better, and made a wiser choice?  Perhaps you were relying on your “gut instincts”, yet, in fact, were fooled by unconscious making traps we all fall into when trying to figure out what we should do. 

According to renowned negotiation and games theory expert, Howard Raiffa, we are destined to repeat the same faulty decision-making process and face more grief from the poor results if we don’t gain insights into some of these traps.  

Raiffa has found that the fault often lies not in the decision-making process but rather in the mind of the decision maker. The way the human brain works can sabotage our decisions.

Here are some insights into the most well-documented traps we set for ourselves in making decisions. Perhaps they can help you make better decisions in the future.

How We Often Distort Our Decision Making
We use unconscious routines, called heuristics, to cope with the complexity inherent in decision-making.  They serve us well in most situations.  For example, in judging distances, we equate clarity with proximity.  The clearer an object appears, the closer we judge it to be.  The fuzzier, the farther we think it is. 

Like most heuristics, it is not foolproof.  On days that are hazier than that to which we are accustomed, our eyes will tend to trick our minds into thinking that things are more distant than they actually are. 

For airplane pilots this distortion could be catastrophic if they weren’t trained to use other truly objective measures and instruments. While this decision-making flaw is based on sensory perception others are based on biases, still others on irrational anomalies in our thinking. 

They are potentially dangerous because they are invisible to us.  They are hardwired into our thinking so we fail to even recognize we are using them.

Here are some of the most common decision-making traps
 - and what you can do to overcome them.

Anchoring

How would you answer these two questions?
1. Is the population of Turkey greater than 35 million?

2. What’s your best estimate of Turkey’s population?

If you are like most people, the figure of 35 million (researchers chose arbitrarily) influenced your answer to the second question. When behavioral scientists ask variations of these questions to groups of people many times over the past decade.  In half the cases, 35 million was used in the first question, in the other half, 100 million. 

Without fail, the answers to the second question increase by millions when the larger figure is used (as an anchor).  When considering a decision, the mind gives disproportionate weight to the first information it receives.  Initial impressions, estimates, or other data anchor subsequent thoughts and judgments. 

The implications to influence another’s perceptions are mind-boggling and can take many guises.  A colleague can offer a comment, or a statistic can appear in the morning newspaper that will influence your subsequent decision making on that topic.

In business, one of the most frequent “anchors” is a past event or trend.  A marketer in attempting to project sales of a product for the coming year often begins by looking at the sales volumes for past years. This approach tends to put too much weight on past history and not enough weight on other factors.

Because anchors can establish the terms on which a decision will be made, they can be used to influence how someone feels about a political issue or as a bargaining tactic by savvy negotiators.

Reduce the impact of the effects of anchoring in these ways:

1. Be open-minded.  Seek information and opinions from a variety of people to widen your frame of reference, without dwelling disproportionately on what you heard first.

2. In seeking advice from others, offer information -- just the facts without your opinion -- so that you don’t inadvertently anchor them with your thoughts. Then you can benefit from hearing diverse views on the situation without their views being colored or anchored by yours.  

3. Whoever most vividly characterizes the situation usually anchors the other’s perception of it.  That’s an immensely powerful ability.  Others literally see and discuss the situation while anchored from that most memorably stated perspective. The most vivid communicator  in the situation often has the most power as she can literally created the playing field on which the game will be played. 

Be especially wary of anchors in negotiations.  Think through your position before any negotiation begins in order to avoid being anchored by someone else’s proposal or position.