When we’re presented with a choice, we carefully weigh the alternatives and choose the option that makes the most sense — or do we? Only recently has science begun to unravel how we really make decisions.
In the face of stress or time pressure, or even seemingly unrelated cues, our assessment of situations and the choices we ultimately make can be colored by innate biases, flawed assumptions and prejudices born of personal experience. And we’re clueless about how they influence our judgments. These unconscious processes can lead us to make decisions that, in fact, don’t really make much sense at all.
If you’re not convinced, go to a group of people and offer each person a dollar. Do this five times, each time asking if the individual wants to buy a $1 lottery ticket. Then offer $5 all at once to a second group, and ask the people how many lottery tickets they would like to buy. You’d think both groups would buy the same number of tickets — after all, they got the same amount of money.
Nope. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon found that the first group would consistently buy twice as many lottery tickets as the group that was given the same amount of money but only one chance to buy lottery tickets.
Here’s another way to see irrational, unconscious biases in action: Change your hairstyle. This experience inspired Malcolm Gladwell to write the bestseller Blink, which looked at the science of snap judgments. After he grew his hair long, his life changed “in very small but significant ways.” He got speeding tickets, was pulled out of airport security lines, and was questioned by police in a rape case, even though the prime suspect was much taller.
