Decision making.
I've read most of the book "Decisive" by Chip Heath and Dan Heath.
Indecisiveness has been a key problem for me throughout my life. I think it's primarily related to depression, anxiety and lack of confidence so I thought that this would be a good book to read to help me start addressing this issue. At the moment my depression and anxiety are manageable. But having suffered from these things for so long, I think they have prevented me from learning the life skills that would help me to make decisions.
I'm also thinking back to a book I read in 2021 called "The Intelligence Trap". This talks about how good levels of intelligence don't necessarily lead to good decision making ability and in some cases greater levels of intelligence can lead to poorer decision making abilities (eg. the tendency to over-think). The book also mentions a proposed condition called "dysrationalia" where people have good levels of intelligence but poor decision making abilities.
The book includes the following definitions:
"Instrumental rationality is defined as ‘the optimisation of someone’s goal fulfilment’, or, less technically, as ‘behaving so that you get exactly what you want, given the resources available to you’. Epistemic rationality, meanwhile, concerns ‘how well your beliefs map onto the actual structure of the world’."
The issue I've been most concerned with is my lack of "Instrumental Rationality". It's clear that I've not been able to make the most of the resources I've had. I've found this quite distressing and it really feels like a huge loss to see how much it has affected my life.
I think that much of this was due to lack of confidence and not ever being able to take the leap and do things. Some of this lack of confidence was arising from fears that came from my addiction and issues around sex. But that said, I do think that my lack of confidence and emotional issues were causing me to process information and make judgements in ways that were quite dysfunctional.
I'm not sure where to start with thinking about decision making so I'll just start typing and see where it leads.
In the book "Decisive" they break decision making down into four stages:
- You encounter a choice.
- You analyze your options.
- You make a choice.
- Then you live with it.
They also write about the four "villains" of decision-making that affect these stages. They also give a way to counter each of these villains.
- You encounter a choice. Villain: But narrow framing makes you miss options. Response: Widen your options.
- You analyze your options. Villain: But the confirmation bias leads you to gather self-serving information. Response: Reality test your assumptions.
- You make a choice. Villain: But short-term emotion will often tempt you to make the wrong one. Response: Attain distance before deciding.
- Then you live with it. Villain: But you’ll often be overconfident about how the future will unfold. Response: Prepare to be wrong.
I'm finding it hard to map my issues with decision making onto these stages and "villains". I think I'll be able to make use of this but it's probably not the best place to start.
There's a quote from right at the end of the book that stays with me:
"Short-run emotion, as we’ve seen, makes the status quo seductive. But when researchers ask the elderly what they regret about their lives, they don’t often regret something they did; they regret things they didn’t do. They regret not seizing opportunities. They regret hesitating. They regret being
indecisive.
Being decisive is itself a choice. Decisiveness is a way of behaving, not an inherited trait. It allows us to make brave and confident choices, not because we know we’ll be right but because it’s better to try and fail than to delay and regret. Our decisions will never be perfect, but they can be better. Bolder. Wiser. The right process can steer us toward the right choice."
They also talk about how a process can give us confidence:
"In our quest to convince you of the merits of a process, we realize we’ve been facing an uphill battle: It would be hard to find a less inspiring word in the English language than “process.” It’s like trying to get people giddy about an algorithm.
What a process provides, though, is more inspiring: confidence. Not cocky overconfidence that comes from collecting biased information and ignoring uncertainties, but the real confidence that comes from knowing you’ve made the best decision that you could. Using a process for decision making doesn’t mean that your choices will always be easy, or that they will always turn out brilliantly, but it does mean you can quiet your mind. You can quit asking, “What am I missing?” You can stop the cycle of agonizing.
Just as important, trusting the process can give you the confidence to take risks. A process can be the equivalent of a mountain climber’s harness and rope, allowing you the freedom to explore without constant worry. A process, far from being a drag or a constraint, can actually give you the comfort to be bolder."
As I'm writing this, I think that a good way for me to start applying the ideas from the book would be to look at how emotions affect all the stages of the process that the authors have described.
The chapters of the book further break down the stage of the process, the "villains" and the responses.
- Widen your options
- Avoid a Narrow Frame
- Multitrack
- Find someone who's solved your problem
- Reality-test your assumptions
- Consider the Opposite
- Zoom Out, Zoom In
- "Ooch" (a coloquial word for taking small steps to try out an approach rather than going all in straight away)
- Attain Distance before deciding
- Overcome Short-Term Emotion
- Honour your Core Priorities.
- Prepare to be wrong
- Bookend the future (analyse worst case and best case scenarios)
- Set a Tripwire (an event that will make you assess how your decision is going and make adjustments if necessary)
There are loads of ways that emotions come into many of these steps. For example in the "Multitrack" chapter, there's the following:
"How you react to the position, in short, depends a great deal on your mindset at the time it’s offered. Psychologists have identified two contrasting mindsets that affect our motivation and our receptiveness to new opportunities: a “prevention focus,” which orients us toward avoiding negative outcomes, and a “promotion focus,” which orients us toward pursuing positive outcomes."
I can definitely see how depression has biased me towards the prevention focus mindset and prevented me from seriously considering options from the promotion focus mindset.
There are other chapters in the book where emotions come into some of the ideas. I'll pick these out later to see how they relate to the problems that I've been having.
I'll definitely put a lot more thought into learning about decision-making. I'm wondering if looking further into the idea of "dysrationalia" might be a better place to start.