Making better choices

Choices. How can we make better choices? How can we help loved ones make better choices?

Keith Stanovich writes

To a psychologist “making better choices” means better human decision-making—and good decision-making to a cognitive scientist means rational decision-making. Philosophers define two types of rationality—instrumental and epistemic. To think rationally means taking the appropriate action given one’s goals and beliefs (instrumental rationality), and holding beliefs that are commensurate with available evidence (epistemic rationality). It’s handy to think of rationality as being about what to do and what is true.

Boys are bombarded with millions of dollars of advertising to believe that as soon as they are old enough, they can use Budweiser or Coors to be the person they want to be. Girls are taught to ride victimhood to success. 20% of American adults get hooked on nicotine.

Things not working out so well? Light up a Marlboro and drink some beer. On the other side of the coin, sales of nicotine substitutes are a multi-billion dollar industry, and AA groups and drug treatment centers abound.

Stanovich again:

people are lazy information processors—they accept problems as given and do not tend to build alternative models of situations. In short, humans tend to be cognitive misers.

Why is it easier for some of us to believe in a loving God Whom we can trust to guide us in our decision making?

Stanovich writes,

Efficient markets have as a side effect the tendency to turn widespread, easily satisfied, first-order desires into adaptive preferences. If you like fast-food, television sit-coms, video-games, recreating in automobiles, violent movies, and alcohol, the market makes it quite easy to get the things you want at a very reasonable cost because these are convenient preferences to have. If you like looking at original paintings, theater, walking in a pristine wood, French films, and fat-free food you can certainly satisfy these preferences if you are sufficiently affluent, but it will be vastly more difficult and costly than in the previous case. So preferences differ in adaptiveness, or convenience, and markets accentuate the convenience of satisfying uncritiqued first-order preferences.

Of course, people can express more considered, higher-order preferences through markets too (e.g., free range eggs, fair-trade coffee) but they are statistically much smaller, harder to trigger via advertising, and lack economies of scale. However, the positive feedback loop surrounding unconsidered, first-order desires can even affect people’s second-order judgments—“Well if everyone is doing it, it must not be so bad after all.” Many symbolic and ethical choices must be developed in opposition to first-order goals that technology-based markets are adapted to fulfilling efficiently. In this way, science and technology might actually undermine our rationality, if rational choices are broadly defined.

Why do we make wrong choices?