When should you trust your instincts? Do your biases interfere with the choices you make?
We’ve gathered advice on decision-making from popular authors such as Malcolm Gladwell (Blink) and Chip and Dan Heath (Decisive). We’ve arranged their views into concrete principles you can use to analyze a decision, approach it from an informed perspective, and make your decision objectively.
Continue reading to learn four principles of decision-making you can put to work in your professional and personal life.
Principles of Decision-Making
Decision-making skills play a key role in every part of life, from professional advancement to personal relationships. Therefore, the ability to pick the best choices available can measurably improve your career, family life, and even happiness. This master guide covers four principles of decision-making you can use to make better choices:
- Know when to trust your instincts
- Understand the decision you’re making
- Compare your options
- Avoid biased thinking
We reference advice from the following works:
- Blink by Malcolm Gladwell
- The Paradox of Choice by Barry Schwartz
- Decisive by Chip and Dan Heath
- Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke
Decision-Making Principle #1: Know When to Trust Your Instincts
While contemplation can be important for some decisions, the authors argue that you shouldn’t discount going with your instincts. In some cases, intuitive decisions are preferable to slower, more thoughtful ones. Popular science author Malcolm Gladwell (Blink) argues that trusting your instincts is particularly useful for split-second decisions.
Making Split-Second Decisions
Gladwell notes that in moments when you have little time, pausing to reason through your options means freezing up and doing nothing. On the other hand, trusting your instincts allows you to act and address the matter at hand. This is because your unconscious mind is particularly good at focusing on the most important details and tuning out less useful information. It can even notice things your conscious mind might miss, like patterns in key details.
For example, imagine you’re driving and see a pile-up ahead. If you try to think through what to do, you’re more likely to get overwhelmed by the chaos, freeze up, and crash. On the other hand, if you act on instinct and make a split-second decision, you might unconsciously recognize a gap in traffic ahead and be able to turn and avoid the pile-up.
Decision-Making Principle #2: Understand the Decision You’re Making
While sometimes intuition is enough, more important and consequential decisions—career choices, large purchases, and so on—require more contemplation to ensure you make the best possible decision. In these cases, several authors we’re discussing suggest that you start by making sure you fully understand the decision. When you fully grasp the issue, you’ll have an easier time making an informed choice. Specifically, they suggest you consider what you want out of your decision and what options are available.
1) Your Goal
Barry Schwartz (The Paradox of Choice) suggests that the first step of the decision-making process is establishing your goal, or what you want to get out of your choice. Knowing your goal gives you a specific way to measure each option available to you and whether it gets you what you want.
For example, Dave is considering whether he wants to go back to school to get a college degree. He lists out his main career goals related to this decision: He wants his salary to increase over time and to eventually rise to a management position. This information helps him compare and contrast the relevant pros and cons of going to college or continuing to work.
2) Your Options
In addition to identifying your goal, outline a list of the best available options. Business experts Chip and Dan Heath (Decisive) argue that you should come up with three or four good and distinct options. They argue that people often get stuck in a binary way of thinking, assuming there are only two mutually exclusive options. This limited focus often prevents you from coming up with better options. On the other hand, having more than three or four options is likely to overwhelm you with redundant or inferior choices. If you need more options, the Heaths suggest talking to others for new ideas and perspectives. If you need fewer options, try to combine the best parts of multiple options into one.
For example, Dave is still considering going back to school. But when he considers his options, he focuses on only two: quit his job to go to school full time, or don’t go to school and continue working full time. By consulting with his coworkers and considering other options, Dave discovers he can go to school at night while still working enough hours to get by.
Decision-Making Principle #3: Get Help
Once you fully understand what you want and what your options are, you can start comparing them. But you don’t have to do this alone. In fact, the authors recommend you seek outside help during your decision-making process. This allows you to get new perspectives on your decision that you wouldn’t otherwise. They recommend two forms of help: seeking out relevant information and participating in group discussions.
1) Seek Out Relevant Information
Chip and Dan Heath explain that a helpful source for decision-making is outside information: The more you know about the choice you have to make, the better you can predict and compare the outcome of each option. They recommend you speak with experts or research the subject related to your decision.
But to make the most of this information, you have to use it purposefully. Gladwell explains that you should only consider the information most relevant to your decision. If you overload yourself with unnecessary detail, you lose track of what is or isn’t useful to achieve your goals. On the other hand, looking at only the most important pieces of information helps you focus on what you specifically want and how each option addresses that.
For example, Dave looks at all available metrics while deciding what college to attend, researching everything from fire safety to athletic programs. This muddles his decision-making process, as every college he considers seems to have tons of pros and cons. But by narrowing his focus to the most important criteria—cost, flexible scheduling, and quality of professors—Dave has a much easier time seeing which colleges are good options for his circumstances.
2) Participate In Group Discussions
You can also benefit from outside help by forming a group to discuss your decision, explains ex-professional poker player and behavioral science author Annie Duke (Thinking in Bets). Other people can identify blind spots in your experience or logic you wouldn’t have noticed otherwise. In addition, explaining and justifying your reasoning out loud to others can help you better understand how and why you feel the way you do about each option. Duke recommends gathering a group of people who are invested in your decisions, have diverse views and experiences, and aren’t afraid to speak up and challenge you.
For example, Dave gathers a bunch of friends to look through his options of colleges. As they discuss pros and cons, one of his college-educated friends chimes in that class sizes make a big difference in the educational experience. This provides Dave with a new metric he can use to compare his options.
Decision-Making Principle #4: Avoid Biased Thinking
Many authors note that another important part of making better decisions is avoiding or limiting your bias, or preexisting beliefs, emotions, and preferences. When you act on bias, you stop thinking logically and pick the option you want to be best—instead of the actual best option. The authors offer a couple of ways to avoid biased thinking, including examining your beliefs or potential biases and considering your decision’s impact on your future.
1) Question Your Beliefs
Chip and Dan Heath suggest you avoid bias by questioning your existing beliefs about your decision. They explain that one of the most common forms of bias is confirmation bias, or the tendency to focus on information that reinforces your existing beliefs. Questioning these beliefs not only helps you recognize what they are—and therefore what you might be biased toward—but also helps you shift focus away from information that confirms them. The Heaths recommend questioning your beliefs by seeking out opposing perspectives and objective statistics as opposed to things you believe in or subjective anecdotes.
For example, Dave is biased toward going to college, believing his career will hit a dead end if he doesn’t go to college. As a result, he pays particular attention to anecdotes and articles about how non-college-educated adults make less money overall. But when he decides to question his belief, he researches developments in his field and finds an option to advance his career without a college degree. This helps him be more objective when making his decision.
2) Consider Your Future
Duke recommends avoiding biased decisions by thinking about your options in terms of their impact on your future. She explains that we’re often biased toward our present desires and feelings since they’re more immediate and obvious—at the expense of our future selves. Focusing on the future lets you distance yourself from these present desires so you can compare your options more objectively. To consider the future, Duke recommends thinking through the potential consequences of each option over a long period.
For example, Dave is biased against going back to school because he finds any kind of change stressful. But by considering where that option would lead him one, five, and 10 years down the line, he’s able to distance himself from his current stress and think more objectively about the potential outcomes of going to college.
Exercise: Analyze Your Decision
Use the four principles mentioned above—knowing when to trust your instincts, understanding your decision, getting help, and avoiding bias—to help you with a decision.
- Write down a decision you have to make or have recently made. Is this decision important enough to deliberate on, or can you make it intuitively? Why?
- What’s your ultimate goal going into that decision? For example, maybe you’re buying a house and want something within your budget that’s in good condition.
- What options are available for the decision you described above? For example, maybe you could buy an older, cheaper house or a more expensive, newer one.
- What kinds of help are available to you? How can you use them? For example, maybe you can get opinions on the houses from different Realtors or discuss the pros and cons of each house with your family.
- What kind of biases do you have going into your decision? How can you challenge or avoid them? For example, maybe you grew up in a ranch home and have a preference for that kind of style. But by picturing the future of the ranch home available to you, you realize it would likely need a lot of repair work over time.
