How many times has this happened to you? You firmly decide what you are going to do – whether it be going to the gym or asking your boss for a raise or placing a much-delayed call to a friend. But then … you end up doing exactly what you did not intend to do: sitting on the couch eating ice cream, binge-watching Netflix, letting one more day go by without speaking to your boss or calling your friend.
Issues of procrastination and willpower come into play of course. But how we decide what to do and why our decisions often go the wrong way, are more complicated than that.
Francesca Gino, a professor of psychology at Harvard and author of one of the books, “Sidetracked: Why Our Decisions Get Derailed and How We Can Stick to the Plan” (Harvard Business Review Press), offers this anecdote. She and her husband visited a souk in Dubai, determined to enjoy the day and to buy something authentic to help them remember the experience when they returned home.
After a day of wandering through stalls that sold traditional goods and faux designer products, her husband was drawn to a store where he spent almost two hours haggling over counterfeit watches that looked as good as the super-expensive originals.
He ended up with a replica of a $7,000 watch for just $100. But, Professor Gino wrote, his euphoria was short-lived. How did a plan to go to the souk and enjoy its traditional ambiance turn into hours of bartering over a fake watch? And now, her husband isn’t even sure he likes it that much.
Having experienced similar situations in the past (don’t ask me about the silver bracelet I bought in an Istanbul market that, I discovered later, was stamped “Made in Mexico”), I might just argue that Professor Gino’s husband fell under the sway of a particularly persuasive salesman. But she says that’s too simple.
Too often, in areas big and small — new career paths, saving for retirement, buying a house — we think we’re going to go in one direction and end up in another.
It’s not that changing our minds is necessarily bad, if, with time and research, we discover that our goals have evolved. But it’s quite another thing to end up in a place you do not want to be — walking out of a souk with a counterfeit watch, say — with no real idea of how you got there. That, Professor Gino wrote, can be “discouraging, demoralizing and baffling.”
Just a little background here: Over the last three decades or so, a growing body of research has demonstrated that far from making decisions on a rational basis, as economists had long believed, humans make all sorts of decisions for all sorts of irrational reasons.
We’re affected by offers that seem better than they are. Who hasn’t added items they don’t really need into their shopping cart on Amazon to get “free” shipping? We are affected by having to make too many decisions, and this doesn’t apply just to trivial matters. For example, researchers have demonstrated that parole decisions by an Israeli panel were largely determined by what time the hearings were held.
The best of intentions may go astray, like the vow to exercise that is followed by standing outside the gym, looking in. We also all tend to do things we’re often not aware of doing, but they hamper our ability to make good choices.
Let me lay out the main ones that I took away from Professor Gino’s book and another one to be published in March on the same subject, “Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work” (Crown Business), by Chip Heath, a professor at the Graduate School of Business at Stanford, and his brother, Dan Heath, a senior fellow at the Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship at Duke.
We tend to gather research that confirms our own biases — a phenomenon called, not surprisingly, confirmation bias by social scientists.
A blatant but true example from the Heaths’ book is that back in the 1960s, before we had so much medical information on the dangers of smoking, smokers were much more likely to read an article headlined, “Smoking Does Not Lead to Lung Cancer,” than one with the headline, “Smoking Leads to Lung Cancer.”
We let emotions play too big a role. They can be set off by situations unrelated to the event. If you’re going on a first date, for example, Professor Gino said, and get caught in traffic, you may feel angry and that can spill over into your date. You may decide it was just a bad match, rather than reflecting on the mood you were in when you arrived.
Most of us tend to be overly optimistic about the future and about own abilities and attributes. The Heaths cite studies showing that doctors who reckoned they were “completely certain” about a diagnosis were wrong 40 percent of the time.
I liked even more a 1997 survey conducted by U.S. News & World Report of 1,000 people, cited by Professor Gino, about who was most likely to get into heaven. Michael Jordan had a 65 percent chance, Mother Teresa a 79 percent chance. But 87 percent of the survey takers decided they were the ones most likely to go to heaven.
So, we’re overconfident, emotional and irrational. What do we do about it?
Being aware when we make decisions that our own feelings, our relationships to others and outside powers all have an impact is a good start, Professor Gino said.
Here’s one of her suggestions: Take your emotional temperature. Try to be more aware of where your emotions are coming from and how, even if seemingly irrelevant, they may be clouding your decision.
When short-term emotions threaten to swamp long-term considerations, Chip Heath suggests that a simple yet highly effective way to think about a difficult decision is to consider what you would recommend to your best friend (the one you didn’t call, by the way).
“When we step back and simulate someone else, it’s a clarifying move,” he said.
Carefully researching information — while at the same time considering the source of that information — is important for a number of reasons. It can help you make a better decision, and it may cause less regret in the long term.
Research shows that we tend to have greater regrets about decisions that have gone wrong when we feel we approached the subject without looking into it deeply enough or considering enough options, said Terry Connolly, a professor of management and organizations at the University of Arizona.
One more thing we should consider when making decisions is that we should not fear regret too much. It’s an inevitable part of life, and if you can say you’ve lived a life without regret, “you’re not having enough adventures, or you’re rationalizing and not truly examining when things went wrong,” Professor Connelly said.
We also tend to overemphasize how much regret we are going to feel, said Neal Roese, a professor of marketing at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. “Most of the time, regret happens quickly and sharply, it hurts, and then it’s over.”
So, as much as possible, think about your decisions carefully, dispassionately and with as much valid information as possible. Look to sources you normally would not. Question your own beliefs and confidence. And then go for it. If you regret it, well, there’s always another decision waiting to be made.
