Decision making

Since the day that we were born we have to make lots of choices every day such as, “What shall we eat tonight?” “Shall I go to Portugal or Spain this summer?” “Shall I go to work by train or by car?”. Happiness involves making good choices, but we do not always make choices that maximize our happiness.

While there are many rational reasons for people to choose to buy a particular product or service, it's often our emotions and personal biases that drive us. We often make predictions of how we will feel in future, there a few major biases in the way we predict our future emotional states, for instance:

1. The projection bias:  
I’m sure you are familiar with this bias, you’re dealing with this bias when you’re going to the supermarket when you are really hungry and you can’t help yourself of buying some kind of junk food or buying way to much food. Afterwards you are wondering why you have bought it.

2. The memory bias:

When people make decisions about the future they naturally use events from the past. Unfortunately the type of memories we retrieve to make decisions about our future happiness are often biased to unusual examples that are either very positive or very negative.

3. Belief bias:

People tend to accept any and all conclusions that fit in with their systems of belief, without any deep consideration of what they are actually agreeing with.

To see if you, my followers, are good at making decisions I have a little test, a “selection task” (Wason’s ,1968);

Below you see 4 cards, with on one side a letter and on the other side a digit. There is one rule attached, if a card has a vowel on one side, then it has an even number on the other side.

Which cards should be turned to validate the rule???

You can find the answer at the end of this blog.

To be honest, I think most of you did not answer this question correctly. Humans perform very poorly on this kind of logical reasoning task.

Another test that you will probably do better is this one;

Again, you find 4 cards below. Now consider the following 4 cards, with a person’s age on one side, and a person’s drinking behavior on the other. There is also one rule again; if a person is drinking beer, then the person must be over 19 years of age.

Which cards to turn to validate this rule?

In general, people find it easier to solve this test, because it is linked to more realistic scenarios. When people have a sort of bonding with the question it is easier to answer correctly.

Unfortunately we will never be good at decision making but let's make the best of it :).

Correct answer ‘selection task’ Wason’s (1968) is: A and 7

Source: Emiel Krahmer & Marc Swerts, University of Tilburg