self
“I used to be indecisive, but now I’m not so sure” Every decision you make is a battle between intuition and logic and, whether you make snap judgements or dither about for ages, weighing up the pros and cons depends on your personality type. But we can learn from both, decides Lizzie Enfield
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inishing this article, my computer prompts me: ‘Do you want to save this document?’. I do, which is why I press ‘save’, but now that it’s questioning my decisions, so am I. Do I really want to save it? Is it even good enough? Or should I just start again? Oh dear… I’m notoriously indecisive. Ask me if I want a cup of tea or coffee and I won’t give you an immediate answer, even though I don’t actually drink coffee. To plump for one beverage option without giving the other due thought seems ill-advised. Deciding what to wear, or what to have for breakfast often makes me late for work. The next decision on my list is where to have a family holiday next year. Will we go abroad or stay in the UK? There are advantages and disadvantages to both choices. I am torn between the two. My husband, however, is decisive.
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photograph trunk aRchive
He walked into our current house, took one look around and decided to offer the asking price, while I was wondering whether the reasonably sized garden compensated for the tiny bathroom. Once he’s made a decision, he won’t agonise over whether it was right or not – he’ll just get on with it.
Intuition versus logic
Sometimes our different approaches help us to reach ‘good’ decisions, while at other times they lead to arguments that go around in circles. The good thing is, I am not alone. People are as different in the way they make their decisions as they are in their preferences for drinking tea or coffee, and both our make-up and our psyches affect the way we go about it. According to psychologists, every decision we take, every judgement we make, is a battle between intuition and logic: a struggle between the part of our mind that analyses a problem
then comes up with a rational solution, and the part that is responsible for ‘gut feelings’ and more intuitive. Interestingly, no matter how rational we think we are, most of our decisions are made by our intuitive mind, which is faster, more easily accessed, and tends to override our slower, logical mind. On top of which, our thinking is riddled with systematic mistakes, known to psychologists as ‘cognitive biases’. There’s the present bias, which makes us focus on what’s happening now; the confirmation bias, which makes us look for information that validates what we already know; and others like the hindsight bias; the negativity bias; the loss-aversion bias; and so on. To use the present bias as an example, if I ask you if you would like half a box of chocolates now, or a whole box tomorrow, more people are likely to go for half now. Despite the fact that >>>