Home › Archive for Intuition
Blog Archives

Come On, This Is Serious.

How scientists tackle their own life choices.

A professor at Columbia is agonizing over a job offer from a rival university. A colleague takes him aside: “Just maximize your expected utility — you always write about doing this.” The professor snaps back: “Come on, this is serious.”

This is an anecdote the German decision scientist Gerd Gigerenzer has been telling for decades [e.g., 1, 2]. The cartoon above is a variation I drew for Art & Mind, the book Dan Hahn and I wrote together. 

Gigerenzer’s point deserves to be stated fairly: he argues that simple rules of thumb often beat elaborate analysis, especially when the future is truly open. On his account, formal methods don’t merely fail to describe how we choose. Sometimes they do worse than our intuition.

…

Read more ›


Summer Reading List 2021: Five Books that Changed my Mind

This past year gave me a fair amount of time to read and listen to audiobooks. Here are five books I found truly impactful, in that they managed to change some of my fundamental previous assumptions and opinions.

Steven Pinker (2018). Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress.

Steven Pinker presents a passionate and persuasive defense of reason, science and progress. He shows with an abundance of data how a commitment to humanitarian values has kept winning – in the long run – dramatically and consistently over the destruction and chaos that would be the easier and more natural course. It is an uplifting as well as urgent perspective that challenges lazy dogmas from both the left and the right of the political spectrum.

To get a first impression and hear his own voice,

…

Read more ›


The Role of the Brand on Choice Overload

I’m excited to share the publication of a new research paper from a collaboration with my colleagues Raffaella Misuraca, Francesco Ceresia, and Palmira Faraci in the journal “Mind and Society”:

Misuraca, R., Ceresia, F. Teuscher, U., & Faraci, P. (2019). The Role of the Brand on Choice Overload. Mind and Society. 

https://doi.org/10.1007/s11299-019-00210-7

[Full text available on request.]

Research Paper: The Role of the Brand on Choice Overload

ABSTRACT:
Current research on choice overload has been mainly conducted with choice options not associated with specific brands. This study investigates whether the presence of brand names in the choice set affects the occurrence of choice overload. Across four studies, we find that when choosing among an overabundance of alternatives, participants express more positive feelings (i.e., higher satisfaction/confidence, lower regret and difficulty) when all the options of the choice set are associated with familiar brands,

…

Read more ›


Decision Skills Matter

To what extent do decision skills matter in real live? Do these skills actually lead to better decision outcomes and fewer unpleasant life events?
Decision Skills Matter
Or, more specifically: do people who perform better on hypothetical decision tasks also make better real-world decisions, to the extent that they experience better outcomes over the course of their lives?

Let’s take a step back. Based on all the different theories of what counts as a “rational” choice, we know that some people perform better in the kinds of choices that are typically presented in research studies. There are people, for example, who are less affected than others by the way information is presented to them (in other words, they are better able to resist framing effects). Or, while most people are overconfident most of the time, some people actually have a pretty accurate level of confidence into their own judgments.

…

Read more ›


Age Differences in Decision Making Skills

A recent study confirms it again: older adults do well with decisions that require emotional skills.

Old age affects our decision-making skills in quite complex ways. Some cognitive skills decline with age, while emotional skills may even improve. This leads to interesting findings: older people do worse on some decision tasks, but they do just as well as younger adults on those same tasks when they get to experience them, rather than read instructions. This recent study, for example, used two ways to present gambling tasks. In the “description-based” task, people received information about different card decks: the probability of winning or losing, and the amount of money that could be won or lost with each card drawn from that particular deck. In the “experience-based” task they received none of that information – they were simply given four card decks,

…

Read more ›


Decision Styles: Are Some Better Than Others?

I was excited to find a new study about decision styles and how they relate to decision qualities.

We know that people have different ways of approaching decisions – or different decision styles. Several studies have suggested the existence of five distinct styles:

baddecisions

1) Rational
An example item in a questionnaire would be:
“I make decisions in a logical and systematic way.”

2) Intuitive
E.g.,“When I make decisions, I tend to rely on my intuition.”

3) Avoidant
E.g.,“I avoid making important decisions until the pressure is on.”

4) Dependent
E.g.,“I rarely make important decisions without consulting other people.”

5) Spontaneous
E.g.,

…

Read more ›


Featured Video: How to Make Hard Choices

I would love to hear what other people take away from this TED talk. Is it helpful? I have lost the distance to the topic, so I want to say: “yes, sure, but there’s more! there’s help! there are tools!” But I guess that’s not her point. She does make other valid points, however her talk still leaves me wondering: would she know how to approach a decision more systematically, if she wanted to? I hope so, because I’ve seen so many times how helpful that can be. Even if in the end, yes, it does come down to personal values.

by Ursina Teuscher (PhD), at Teuscher Decision Coaching, Portland OR

…

Read more ›


Book Recommendation: The Upside of Irrationality

Dan Ariely (2011). The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic.

Dan Ariely is a great thinker, scientist and story-teller. In this book, he weaves personal anecdotes and research findings together to help us gain insight into our own irrational minds.

Recognizing our own behaviors and thinking patterns is a great stepping stone towards improvement. But rather than assume we could do better and be more rational (which I do believe is important and possible too, at least sometimes…), Dan Ariely suggests we should find ways to make our own irrationalities work in our favor. I find this mindset very useful in practice. In particular, he suggests many methods of how the “right” choice can become the “easy” choice for us. Those are great strategies to set us up for success.

In general,

…

Read more ›


Self-Assessments: The Myth of Personality Types

Or: Mind the Bell-Curve

First off, here’s a fun article about the Myers Briggs (MBTI) that I wish I had written myself. It speaks from my heart.

But even apart from the Myers Briggs, any theory claiming that people come in distinct personality “types” (e.g., the “Eneagram”, “True Colors”, “Are you a dog or a cat person?”, etc.) has a very fundamental problem: none of those types make sense, for two simple reasons. (Geoffrey Miller explains them in more detail and eloquence in his book “Spent”, which I had reviewed earlier on this blog.)

1. Personality traits have been documented in a huge body of research. After decades of studies by a multitude of independent groups, and after many data-driven revisions of initial theories,

…

Read more ›


Decision Fatigue: Time for a Break Now?

It turns out that making decisions is tiring and wears us out, more so than other (similarly difficult) mental tasks. At this point, a large body of research shows that whenever we make many choices in a row, the quality of our decisions gets worse over time.

Decisions that are especially taxing are those that involve self-control. For example, when people fended off the temptation to eat M&M’s or freshly baked chocolate-chip cookies, they were then less able to resist other temptations later on.
Nourishment and Recovery
Self-control tasks and decisions also require more glucose in the brain than other mental tasks. Low or hypoglycemic levels of glucose lead to impaired decision making, poor planning, and inflexible thinking. In contrast, simple psychomotor abilities, such as responding quickly to certain cues, seem relatively unaffected by glucose levels.

Rest and Sleep

This pattern is in line with other things we know about impulsive behavior and typical self-control problems.

…

Read more ›


Featured Video: Can You Make Yourself Smarter?

This RSA talk by Dan Hurly is a bit slow (I recommend listening to it while doing something else, rather than watching), but I found the content excellent, well-researched and important.

(The actual talk starts at 1:30 and ends at 27min, the rest is Q&A.)

Here’s why I believe it’s so important:

1. Smartness matters. 
Intelligence is often underrated as a geeky and nerdy quality, irrelevant for practical purposes, or even worse, as being a hindrance for emotional and intuitive skills. That’s very wrong: general intelligence is highly related to emotional and social skills, and even to health and longevity.

2. Yes, we can become smarter.
Therefore I think we should make that effort – not just for ourselves, but for the coming generation. Let’s remember that the children who are now in school are the ones that will make decisions for us when we’re old.

…

Read more ›


Book Recommendation: Stumbling on Happiness

Daniel T. Gilbert. Stumbling on Happiness.

This is my pick for the season: an entertaining and well-researched book about our failures to predict what will make us happy or unhappy in the future, and about how these misconceptions affect our decisions.

 

…

Read more ›


One Simple Decision Rule

“You never regret a swim.”
— Swedish Folk Wisdom

DecisionRule_Swim

 

 

 

 

 

 

…

Read more ›


Thinking in a foreign language makes decisions more rational

An interesting study that came out this year suggests that when people think in another than their native language, they are judging risks more rationally:

With several experiments, the researchers showed that those thinking in a foreign language did not fall prey to the typical biases and framing effects, and overall made more rational decisions than those thinking in their own native language.

Why is that? It seems counter-intuitive on first sight, but it makes perfect sense, if thinking in a foreign language helps us slows down. The more awkward way of thinking may lead to less automatic processing and help us think more deliberately.

…

Read more ›


Top

Privacy Policy - Terms and Conditions