When You Don’t Do What You Meant To, and Don’t Know Why
By Alina Tugend
HOW many times has this happened to you? You firmly decide
what you’re 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.
The best of intentions may go astray, like the vow to
exercise that is followed by standing outside the gym, looking in.
But then, you end up doing exactly what you did not intend
to: sitting on the couch eating ice cream, letting one more day go by without
speaking to your boss or calling your friend.
Issues of procrastination and will power 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.
Two books scheduled for release in March look at why we
often do not make the right decisions — or follow through on the ones we
planned — and how we can change that.
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 superexpensive 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 ambience 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. Researchers have demonstrated that
parole decisions by an Israeli panel were largely determined by what time the
hearings were held.
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.
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.
“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.
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