The Importance Of Decision Making

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Do you ever find yourself struggling to make decisions? “You make over 200 food related decisions a day”, according to a study done by Susan Lang. Imagine how many you are making throughout your entire day, even things like: if you should do the laundry, brush your teeth, or get out of bed in the morning. We make thousands of these little decisions every day, but when it comes to making any kind of complex ones, even the little ones, we tend to avoid them. I have found when I avoid making up my mind; the easiest way to deal with it is to think quickly and decide immediately. I think of any information of similar past events that instantly comes to mind when I am trying to figure something out. This is referred to as the availability heuristic, …show more content…

If you had a job interview you wouldn’t want your interviewer to make biased decisions about you would you? Depending on the situation and biases formed you could be making up your mind based on them; whether you are even aware you are doing it; or whether it is fair or not. That is why taking the time to weight your options, then coming back to answer it after a short period of distracted time, is a far better way to make …show more content…

A more well known study done by Dijksterhuis proved that this method is superior compared to other methods. The study suggests, “3 groups of participants were shown four different apartments, and were told 12 details about each of them. There was a designated good apartment, and bad apartment within the four choices, and they were asked to choose the “good” apartment. The first group had to choose immediately without giving much thought. The second was given time to think over their decision, or let their conscious mind take over. The third group was given another task, unrelated to the apartments, for a short period of time before choosing. This time is to let their unconscious mind take over, and go over the details that your conscious mind would not catch. It was concluded that 59.3 percent chose the good apartment after being distracted. However, the participants that were given time to let their conscious mind take over had a 47.1 percent success rate. Likewise, only 36.4 percent of the participants that had to choose immediately chose the good apartment. Overall, it was concluded that the unconscious thought improved the quality of decisions. Moreover, a few minutes of conscious thought generally did not lead to better decisions compared with conditions where people did not consciously think.” Making decisions quickly is clearly one of the least successful ways of

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