Tag: “Decision Making”

At any specific moment throughout the day, how do you decide what are you going to do next? It could be that you are still used to defining your priorities by assigning a number to each of your pending tasks so that later on you can choose the one with the highest number (even though that number was assigned 20 days ago, when the situation was completely different to the actual one). Working with these type of priorities, though usual, it’s a very poor self-management strategy.

All of us, some more than others, are victims of the default effect. When we have a lot of options to choose from, among which there’s a predetermined one—a default choice—most of us just go with the standard option. In other words, we choose not to choose.

“Satisficing” is a term that the economist Herbert Simon coined in 1956. It’s actually a cross between the words “satisfying” and “sufficing”, and comes to say that when we have to make a decision, we generally don’t waste much time evaluating all possible options, we just choose the first reasonable option we find.

The referee gives a penalty kick in a soccer match. The ball will take a split second to reach the goal from the moment of the striker’s kick, so the goalie cannot wait to see the ball’s trajectory to decide to which side he should jump. The decision should be taken beforehand. The odd thing is that the goalkeeper will decide, in most cases, to jump to the right side or to the left side, when the optimal strategy according to statistics is the third option: standing in the middle. Why won’t he stand still? Just because doing nothing is always somewhat embarrassing, even if it is the right thing to do.

Confirmation bias is a cognitive bias that makes us give much credit to the information that confirms our beliefs, while making us ignore the information that challenges our expectations. In other words, people tend to favorably filter information that confirms their preconceptions or hypotheses regardless of the veracity or falsehood of that information.