Making Decisions That Matter

How People Face Important Life Choices

Kathleen M. Galotti

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781135664879
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Researchers studying decision making have traditionally studied the phenomenon in the laboratory, with hypothetical decisions that may or may not involve the decision maker's values, passions, or areas of expertise. The assumption is that the findings of these well-controlled laboratory studies will shed light on the important decisions people make in their everyday lives. This book examines that assumption. The volume begins by covering four basic phases of decision making: setting or clarifying goals, gathering information, structuring the decision, and making a final choice. Comprehensive reviews of existing literature on each of these topics is provided. Next, the author examines differences in decision making as a function of several factors not typically discussed in the literature: the type of decision being made (e.g., legal, medical, moral) and the existence of individual differences in the decision maker (developmental differences, individual differences in style or temperament, differences as a function of expertise). The author then examines the topic of group decision making, contrasting it with individual decision making. The volume concludes with some observations and suggestions for improving peoples' everyday decision making. This book is intended for use as a core textbook or supplement for courses in psychology, education, or allied disciplines. It will also be an invaluable resource for people who work with people making decisions in various applied settings, such as schools, universities, and health care centers.

1
Introduction and Overview

Beth, an undergraduate psychology major at the college where I teach, is sitting in my office. We are having the 17th in what will turn out to be a long series of discussions on the topic, “What should Beth do after college?” Beth is pretty sure she wants to go to graduate school, but she’s not 100% certain of her decision yet. Moreover, she has a million questions, doubts, and worries. Is she good enough to get in? Where should she go? In what area within psychology should she specialize? What are her job prospects when she gets out of school?

Over the years, I’ve worked with many students making this and other decisions: What to major in? How to find a summer internship? What kind of career? I’ve also discussed other important decisions with friends: What kind of day care provider should they have for their children? To which school should they send their children? Is it time to consider a career change? I’ve also sweated out a number of important decisions in my own life: Which job should I take (or should I have taken)? Is it time to change jobs? Should I consider adopting a child? These are just a few that come to mind. Because one of my research interests is decision making, I’ve felt both intrigued and privileged to have the opportunity to view these processes up close. This book describes what I’ve learned about applying the research findings from laboratory research in cognitive psychology to real-life decisions.

WHAT IS DECISION-MAKING?

Cognitive psychologists use the term decision making to refer to the mental activities that take place in choosing among alternatives. Let’s consider this process with another perhaps familiar example: Choosing a new car. The decision about a new car may be part of a larger set of decisions about budgets and lifestyles. After all, sports cars and minivans have different characteristics, capabilities, and costs.

Typically, these decisions are made under conditions of some uncertainty. For example, people want a car that is very reliable, but they may not have good information about automobile reliability. And, even if there is reason to believe, for example, that Buicks are more reliable than Chevrolets, it does not follow that every Buick will be more reliable than every Chevy. So, the decision maker can almost never be absolutely certain that his or her decision will turn out exactly as planned. Dealing with this uncertainty appears to be a major factor in the way people approach decisions.

Car buyers also often have many goals in purchasing a car, and some of these goals may conflict. For example, people may want a car that has a powerful engine, has stylish looks, isn’t terribly expensive, and has a good repair record. However, the cars that have powerful engines might not be the relatively inexpensive ones. Therefore, the car buyer may have to prioritize his or her goals—that is, decide which criteria matter most. Different people will attach different priorities to different goals at different times in their lives, of course, which is why, in most cases, there is no absolutely correct choice to make.

When I meet with students making important life decisions (e.g., choosing which college major to declare), they often show signs of agitation. They know that they need to make a decision but do not know how to do it. They wish the uncertainty over, but they don’t want to close off options prematurely. They are aware that a lot of information relevant to the decision exists but don’t know quite how to collect, organize, and use it all in the time allotted. They know there are no guarantees, but they don’t want to make unfortunate choices.

Another source of difficulty in making this decision is the number of options available. My college has more than 30 majors available. In addition, there is an option for students to design their own interdisciplinary major. There are also options to double major, declare concentrations (sort of like minors), participate in off-campus study programs, and so on, adding complications to the process of making a final choice.

Between their goals and their potential options, students often seem to find the amount of potentially relevant information quickly becoming staggering. In these cases, the students seek help. Specifically, they often want to know what kind and how much information to gather. Is it enough, they wonder, to talk to one person majoring in each of the departments in which they are interested? Or should they try to survey two, or four? Depending on the number of majors they are considering, it is clear that the number of “interviews” could quickly become quite large.

Secondly, students wonder how to select among the various potential sources of information. For instance, how much should they rely on information from the different college departments, most of which either publish official handbooks or sponsor informational meetings? Which students should be interviewed, the top students in the department or the “average” students? The happy, enthusiastic students or the ones who are somewhat cynical?

Another issue is what to do with conflicting information. Say, for instance, that the department handbook describes the curriculum one way, but a friend who is a major reports that reality is at odds with the official description. Should one interrogate the department chair, conduct a written survey of all the majors, or believe one source and discount the other? And if so, which source?

Moreover, sophomore students I talk with often complain about the fact that they have to make this important decision while they are simultaneously leading their typically hurried lives. That is, they still have to study for tests, write papers, read assignments, meet their extracurricular commitments—in short, they have very little extra time to collect, sort through, weigh, and assess all the information they gather. Some of the students report feeling overwhelmed and joke about flipping coins or using dartboards to make the decision—figuring that “getting it over with” is well worth the possible costs of making an “irrational” decision. My surmise from these conversations is that the students simply don’t know what it means to be rational when it comes to making an important real-life decision while living their lives in the real world. I argue in this book that there are ways of being rational that don’t lead to endless deliberation or require the decision maker to spend a month sequestered in a log cabin without phones or electricity. To make that argument, I must first discuss the concept of rationality.

WHAT IS RATIONAL DECISION MAKING?

Sometimes decisions that are made carefully and well don’t end up happily. Because decisions are often made under conditions of uncertainty, some do not yield the hoped-for results, even if made carefully and after thorough, unbiased consideration of the evidence. For this reason, psychologists generally argue that “goodness” of decision making cannot be measured by the success of individual decisions—luck, for instance, often plays too great a role. Instead, the yardstick of success is often taken to be the rationality of the decision.

So what exactly makes a decision a rational one? There are different definitions of rationality, of course. A typical definition comes from von Winterfeldt and Edwards (1986): rational decision making “has to do with selecting ways of thinking and acting to serve your ends or goals or moral imperatives, whatever they may be, as well as the environment permits” (p. 2). Let’s translate this into a specific example. If you are trying to choose a new car, to choose “rationally” you need first to make sure that you are taking into consideration all of your relevant goals and objectives, not just the ones you think of first. If you walk onto a new car lot and pick out a car just because you think it looks “snazzy,” then you probably aren’t being rational. Why? Because you aren’t taking into account all of your other goals and criteria, for example, a car that gets good gasoline mileage, a car that has up-to-date safety features, a car that has a certain amount of cargo space.

Rational decision making also requires that you gather information about your decision as carefully as possible under the circumstances. Rational decision making requires in particular that you look at not only evidence that supports your initial inclinations but also evidence that does not. (We will talk more about this counterintuitive point in chapter 3.) So, in the car example, rational decision making requires that you seek out unbiased information (e.g., you check out Consumer Reports, instead of relying only on the advice of a salesman, or even your uncle Fred).

PHASES OF DECISION MAKING

For most even minimally complex decisions, the decision maker has to engage in several tasks. These tasks might, in the typical case, be ordered so that one task is completed before the next one begins. In this case, we might refer to these tasks as stages of decision making. The term stages is meant to imply that the tasks have a predetermined order to them, that to accomplish stage 2, for example, one first must finish stage 1. This in turn implies that each stage is a prerequisite for the next, and that no skipping of stages can occur.

All of these are fairly stringent requirements, and the empirical evidence isn’t clear enough to assert that typical decision-making processes meet them. As a consequence, I will use the term, phases, to refer to these tasks. The term phases is meant to imply that there may or may not be a set order to the tasks, that the performance of one task can overlap with the performance of another, that some tasks can be skipped, and that tasks can be done in different orders. I also want to allow for the possibility of a decision maker cycling through the different tasks, in other words, doing the first task, then the second, and then the third, then going back and revisiting the first, and so on.

For now, I’ll just give a brief description of each of these phases of decision making. As you’ll see in the table of contents, most of these phases are discussed in far more detail in chapters 2 through 5.

Setting Goals

When we try to understand why a person makes one decision rather than another, it often turns out that the reasons have to do with the decision maker’s goals for the decision. Let’s return to the example of choosing a college major. Many students I talk with describe their plan to declare an economics major, because their goal is to go into business after college. Others tell me they are thinking about biology because they want to get into medical school. (By the way, I’m just reporting what I’ve been told and am expressly not endorsing these views.) To the contrary, I’ve heard of medical schools that welcome a diversity of majors, and top CEOs often have very traditional “liberal-artsy” majors, such as classics or history.

The idea in setting goals is that the decision maker takes stock of his or her plans for the future, his or her principles and values, and his or her priorities. That is, the decision maker needs to develop answers to the question, “What am I trying to accomplish?” Those answers are the decision maker’s goals, and they will influence decision making in various ways, as we will see.

Gathering Information

Before ...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Introduction and Overview
• 2 Setting Goals and Making Plans
• 3 Gathering Information
• 4 Structuring the Decision
• 5 Making a Final Choice
• 6 Making Different Kinds of Decisions
• 7 Developing Decision-Making Skills, Expertise, and Style
• 8 Group and Organizational Decision Making
• 9 Improving Decision Making
• References
• Author Index
• Subject Index
• About the Author