Upgrade the Outcome of Your Biggest Life Decisions

Our intuitive, fast action brains dominate our slower search and reasoning brains. As a result some of our most important decisions are made for us before the rational side of our brain is even engaged. To upgrade the outcomes of our biggest life decisions we need to slow our minds down and put our reasoning brain in charge when making these more critical choices.

As it turns out that is very hard to do. There are triggers and circumstances that cause our intuitive brain to exclude our reasoning brain. The big danger is we don’t even know this is happening.

To escape this lack of awareness of our own reasoning lapses it does help to be aware that there are certain triggers and circumstances that cause our intuitive brain to dominate our reasoning brain.

These include the strong influence of past people or situational impressions even when they have little or no relevance to your present decision. Available memories especially if they are recent or very impactful often lead the intuitive brain to incorrect current decisions. In addition lack of sleep, tedium, and diversions often steer us to the quick answer provided by the intuitive brain, even though it’s wrong.

In his excellent book, Thinking Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman has confirmed that these glitches in our thinking are most often due to the dominance of what we are calling here our intuitive brain. Kahneman labels it our System 1 brain. It continuously streams into our consciousness unquestioned intentions, comparisons and snap judgements that dominate our routine thinking.

This intuitive part of the brain is generally very good at what it does: its models of familiar situations are accurate, its short-term predictions are usually right as well, and its initial reactions to challenges are swift and generally appropriate. Kahneman’s Nobel Prize winning, world changing “but” is that our intuitive brain has biases, systematic errors that it is prone to make in specified circumstances. These biases can be harmful to intelligent decision making and our lives.

These biased errors are very often unchecked because our reasoning brain is lazy. The rational side of the brain does not consistently engage to evaluate factual criteria. Instead your intuitive brain shoots out an inaccurate thought or comparison or even a random number leading to a false conclusion based on irrelevant data. Here’s one example of many varying causal studies Kahneman gives in his book.

Subjects were asked to jot down the last two digits of their social security number before they participated in an auction. They were then asked to indicate what their maximum bid would be for each item to be auctioned. Researchers found that the higher the two digits the higher the bids. Participants with social security numbers ending in the upper 20 percent placed bids that were between 216 to 346 percent higher than those with social security numbers ending in the lowest 20 percent. The reasoning brain was not bidding; instead the intuitive brain had control based on an irrelevant recent input, a random number.

Compounding the negative effect of such wrong intuitive decisions, once we initially accept a conclusion in our intuitive brain we are very likely to believe arguments that appear to support it, even when these arguments are unsound. When your intuitive brain is involved the conclusion comes first and the justification follows. What to do?

The Harvard Business Review described two of Kahneman’s decision making “rules.” First, be less certain. If he had a magic wand the first bias he would eliminate is overconfidence. Overconfidence is not a trait of every person or every culture but the probability is you are often more confident about each factor of a decision-making process than you ought to be. Have you truly engaged your reasoning brain to determine if each step in your plan has a high probability of leading to the next; or have you even thought through all the next steps required? Have you considered and prepared for an unexpected outcome?

The second rule is to ask “How often does that typically occur?” HBR quotes a story of a question Kahneman asked of his collaborators on a textbook, “When do you estimate we will complete our first draft?” Everyone, including Kahneman estimated somewhere between 18 months and two and a half years. He followed up by asking a co-author, who had worked on numerous textbook projects how long it usually took. The co-author answered he could not think of a project that had been completed in under seven years and in fact, 40% of groups never finished their books. The text was about rationality and the co-author had answered without thinking about similar previous cases he was very familiar with.

The point: When making a decision ask and research “How long did similar projects take?” “How much did similar efforts costs?” “What percentage of efforts like this fail?”
“What does the average home remodel cost?”

Remember, too, the often quoted rule, avoid making significant decisions when you are tired, hungry or angry. Your mental will power to engage your reasoning brain is weak.

The chief thing you can do is check yourself. No matter how confident you are in your initial answer – if it’s an important decision, slow your thinking down, get past your intuitive thoughts, and do your best to fully engage your reasoning brain. That alone will upgrade the outcome of your most important life decisions.

Jim Bird
Publisher

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*Publisher Note: This article borrows heavily from the writing and research of Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman’s excellent book Thinking, Fast and Slow, Michael Lewis’ book, The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds and the Harvard Business Review article “3 Ways to Improve Your Decision Making”, Walter Frick, January 22, 2018.