Whether you’re choosing spaghetti sauce or a life partner, making decisions can be paralyzing. In this podcast, TED speakers Malcolm Gladwell, Sheena Iyengar, Ruth Change, and Dan Ariely explore how we make the choices we make, and how we learn to live with them.
Malcolm Gladwell talks about how our choices affect our emotions and whether they make us happier. Sheena Iyengar talks about why are so many choices can be so paralyzing. Ruth Change talks about how making hard decisions empower us in the long run.
The last speaker caught my attention the most. Dan Ariely talks about when decisions are made for us to choose consciously or unconsciously. He speaks about how questions can be structured to trick our minds into making the decision that the creator of the question wants us to make, he calls the questions cognitive illusions, or decision- making illusions.
One example he shows is of a percentage of people who indicated they would be interested in entering the organ donor program. He shows a group of different countries in Europe, and there are two groups of countries. The countries on the right were more toward donating their organs, and the countries on the left that seem to be more toward not entering the organ donor program. He asks, “Why do some country populations want to enter the program while the other country populations don’t?”
When you ask a person this question, they usually think that it has to do with culture. How much does a person care about a stranger? Does it have to do with religion? He points out that the countries that we think about to be very similar from a cultural perspective actually show different behavior. He points out that Sweden is all the way on the right, and Denmark, which we think is culturally similar, is all the way on the left. There is the same pattern with Germany being on the left, and Austria on the right. All the countries he points out are all very similar from a cultural standpoint but somehow are different when it comes to entering the organ donor program.
So what are these countries doing? It turns out the secret has to do with a form at the DMV and how they map their questions. He says, “The countries on the left have a form at the DMV that looks something like this. “Check the box below if you want to participate in the organ donor program.” And what happens? People don’t check, and they don’t join. The countries on the right, the ones that give a lot, have a slightly different form. It says, “Check the box below if you don’t want to participate.” Interestingly enough, when people get this, they again don’t check, but now they join.”
Think about it. We wake up in the morning, get out of bed, and we feel we make our own decisions. We get up, and we open the closet, we think that we decide what to wear. We open the cabinet, and we feel that we choose what to eat for breakfast. He brings across the point that a lot of our decisions are not made by us. The decisions are made by whoever made that cereal box, that outfit in your closet, etc. We feel like we’re in the driver’s seat, that we’re in control and we are making the decision. It’s tough to even accept the idea that we actually have an illusion of making a decision, rather than an actual choice.
Decisions are not easy to make. They are not irrelevant. They are in our everyday lives, and it’s sometimes complex to explain why we chose what we chose. Sometimes decisions are so complicated that we don’t know what to do. Since we have no idea what to do, we just pick whatever it is that was chosen for us.
Comentarios