742 - The Truth About Decision Making

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In this episode, we look at the various factors that go into making a decision. Get excited, because this is Tiny Leaps, Big Changes.

Welcome to another episode of Tiny Leaps, Big Changes where I share research-backed strategies you can use, to get more out of your life. My name is Gregg Clunis.

The Research:

George Loewenstein, Ted O’Donoghue, and Sudeep Bhatia published a paper in 2015 titled,  "Modeling the Interplay Between Affect and Deliberation”.

What They Found:

The researchers developed a model “in which a person’s behavior is determined by an interaction between deliberative processes that assess options with a broad, goal-based perspective, and affective processes that encompass emotions and other motivational states”.

The results indicated that “there is a great deal of evidence that people’s decisions are influenced by both affective and deliberative processes. Whereas standard consequentialist models focus, for the most part, on deliberative processes, our main contribution in this article has been to develop a formal model to incorporate affective processes. In particular, we have modeled the impact of affective processes using a motivation function that is myopic, that displays loss aversion and is insensitive to probabilities, and that is influenced by sympathy and empathy concerns”.

• The study shows that we not only use deliberative processes to make decisions, but also affective processes.
• The information found in this article reinforces things that we already know about decision making.
• Our emotional responses can have more of an effect on our decision making than we initially thought.
• Most decisions are not logical and our emotional biases hold more weight on our decision making process.

Key Takeaways:

• Decisions are made using both logical and emotional processes.
• Our sympathy and empathy towards others can influence our decisions we make.
• The decisions we make on a day to day basis matter.
• Decisions no matter how big or small can influence our experience later in life.
• Add time to your decision making. Time will take some of the emotional factor out, and help you make a more logical decision.

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Readings:

Modeling the interplay between affect and deliberation. - PsycNET (apa.org)