From picking out what to wear in the morning, to choosing your profession or where to live, life is full of decisions, both big and small. But what can science do to help us make better choices?
To answer this question and much more we sat down with Dr Sheheryar Banuri, a development economist and lecturer based at the University of East Anglia and author of the book The Decisive Mind: how to Make the Right Choice Every Time.
What’s going on in our brains when we're confronted by a decision?
Basically the classic model, which is a simplified model of the brain but I think very powerful one, is what's known as System one/System two thinking, or thinking fast and slow. This is a concept popularised by the Israeli-American psychologist and economist Daniel Kahneman in a bestselling book.
The idea here is very simple. There’s system two processes that lead to deliberative decision-making, and system one processes that lead to emotional or reactive decision-making.
When we are confronted by a decision we go through a sort of mental calculus. It’s very quick but the idea is that we are trying to decide if something is worth deliberating – are the rewards worth the mental effort we are going to put in.
Lots of times your brain will say, no, that’s not worth the effort, make a quick decision and move on, that’s system one, whereas system two thinking requires using mental resources, so things like sitting in class or learning something new.
Lots of times we’re thinking about instant rewards. So you'll spend a lot of time picking out the destination for your holiday, but no time at all picking out the insurance.
These are the different sorts of mental processes that guide us toward making what could be a very bad decision.
How do you define a bad decision?
Basically, how I think about it is that a bad decision is any decision that runs counter to an aspiration or a goal that you have. So, if your aspiration is to write a book, any decision that takes you further away from writing that book - long sessions of gaming, for example - which is a problem for me, is something that I would classify as a bad decision.
I leave it up to the individual to classify bad decisions for themselves. But the idea is that a bad decision is something that moves them further away from where they'd like to be.
Read more:
How do long-term and short-term outcomes affect decision-making?
The literature is quite clear. We vary in how much we value short-term over long-term. This is what economists call hyperbolic discounting. But you can also think of it broadly as patience. The idea is that we differ in our capacity to delay immediate rewards for future rewards.
There are some classic experiments that show this. I'd urge anybody who's more interested in this to look up videos on the marshmallow test as a cute example of this. Researchers offer children a marshmallow on a plate and say, "If you wait until we come back, you can have two marshmallows".
The idea is that they then leave the child alone in the room who then has to fight off the tendency to eat the one marshmallow in the hope of getting two. Adaptations of this experiment with adults and with animals in many different contexts show that there's a very high premium on getting rewards now. The power of now is very, very strong.
We want rewards now because the future is uncertain. Even in evolutionary biology, they talk about it. You don't know if you're going to live tomorrow, so why would you delay rewards for tomorrow? Nowadays, that's different. But our thinking still remains the same.
Trying to push back those initial instincts to gain rewards that are going to occur in the future is the secret to achieving long-term goals. But that requires a lot of mental resources.
This conversation has been edited for clarity and length. The full interview, which featured in the BBC Science Focus podcast series Instant Genius, is available below.
About our expert, Dr Sheheryar Banuri
Sheheryar is a development economist and lecturer based at the University of East Anglia.
His research focuses on motivation and decision-making and has been published in The Journal of Public Health and The Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization.
His book The Decisive Mind: How to Make the Right Choice Every Time is out now.
Read more: