We say that we “decide” to get married, to have children, to live in particular cities or embark on particular careers, and in a sense this is true. But how do we actually make those choices?
.” In the meantime, he faced a more pressing analytical problem. Darwin was considering proposing to his cousin Emma Wedgwood, but he worried that marriage and children might impede his scientific career. To figure out what to do, he made two lists. “Loss of time,” he wrote on the first. “Perhaps quarreling. . . . Cannot read in the evenings. . . . Anxiety and responsibility. Perhaps my wife won’t like London; then the sentence is banishment and degradation into indolent, idle fool.
Johnson hopes to reform us. He examines a number of complex decisions with far-reaching consequences—such as the choice, made by President Barack Obama and his advisers, to green-light the raid on Osama bin Laden’s presumed compound, in Abbottabad, Pakistan—and then shows how the people in charge drew upon insights from “decision science,” a research field at the intersection of behavioral economics, psychology, and management. He thinks that we should apply such techniques to our own lives.
Ideally, we’d be omniscient and clearheaded. In reality, we make decisions in imperfect conditions that prevent us from thinking things through. This, Johnson explains, is the problem of “bounded rationality.” Choices are constrained by earlier choices; facts go undiscovered, ignored, or misunderstood; decision-makers are compromised by groupthink and by their own fallible minds.
It would be strange to stage a war game about a prospective marriage. Still, Johnson writes, decision science has lessons for us as individuals. Late in “Farsighted,” he recounts his own use of decision-scientific strategies to persuade his wife to move, with their two children, from New York City to the Bay Area. Johnson starts with intuitions—redwoods are beautiful; the tech scene is cool—but quickly moves beyond them.
From this perspective, a decision is essentially a value-maximizing equation. If you’re going out and can’t decide whether to take an umbrella, you could come to a decision by following a formula that assigns weights to the probability of rain, the pleasure you’ll feel in strolling unencumbered, and the displeasure you’ll feel if you get wet.
The nature of “opting situations,” she thought, explains why people “are in fact more casual and cavalier in the way they handle their big decisions than in the way they handle their ordinary decisions.” Yet it’s our unexplored options that haunt us. A decision-maker who buys a Subaru doesn’t dwell on the Toyota that might have been: the Toyota doesn’t represent a version of herself with different values.
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