There’s a simple way to improve your decision-making, according to a cognitive scientist

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There’s a simple way to improve your decision-making, according to a cognitive scientist

By Art Markman

When faced with a decision, you typically have to choose among several options. You might be considering a set of houses, several pairs of glasses, or projects that your team is going to carry out at work. Comparing the options seems like a great way to highlight the strengths and weaknesses of the possibilities.

Unfortunately, there are several problems with this approach.

For one thing, when you compare options, you are biased to focus on dimensions along which the options match up. Comparing houses, you may focus on the number of bedrooms, square footage, or distance from work. Each of the options has a value. When one option has a property that none of the others have, then those elements get de-emphasized. For instance, if one house has an exercise room and the others do not, this may fade to the background in your choice.

Research suggests that the comparison process used by the brain is biased toward these overlapping properties. Also, it’s often easier to evaluate aspects of decisions when you have a point of comparison. You may not know whether 2,400 square feet is a good size for a house, but if one house is 2,400 square feet and the other is 2,100 square feet, that provides useful information. It’s often easier to justify choosing one thing over another when you can focus on comparable aspects of the options.

Unfortunately, the information that is easiest to compare across options may not be the information that is most important for determining your satisfaction with the decision afterward. After all, once you have selected an option, that is the one you have. The options you did not select are gone.

For really important decisions, you should spend some time focusing on each option individually and imagining the context in which you’re going to live with that option. So, for example, rather than comparing houses structurally, think about what you’re going to do in them. Does that lead you to focus on different information than in your initial comparisons? Similarly, if you’re choosing among projects to pursue, consider the elements of those projects that make them particularly worth supporting (or not).

When you consider each option in isolation, you’re likely to realize that there are aspects of those options you do not understand that well and need to get more information. It’s far better to gather that information before selecting something than waiting until you’re stuck with an option before realizing that there were key aspects of it that you had not wrapped your head around.

Considering options in isolation can be valuable, but it is effortful. If you’re making choices that are not that consequential, comparing options is a good strategy, because it can be done quickly, and there probably won’t be a high cost of picking an option that is not the best one. If you’re choosing candy bars, a quick and easy decision is fine, because even a mediocre candy experience is still a good experience. But when the stakes are high, it’s worth it to do the work required to understand and evaluate each option individually.

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