This is especially especially true in high stress (or even mild stress) or hurried situations. I find myself totally unable to process the information, to assess the positives or negatives in any kind of coherent manner and almost always end up with "What Could It Hurt?" which is inevitably the wrong decision. (Salesmen are trained to make every sale seem high pressure, to trick people like me into betting the farm)
I have wasted probably in the thousands of dollars on these decisions (they are always expensive) and not only my own time, but others as well.
I recently read an article about a guy who resolved to stop making his own decisions. He would, from then on ask total strangers what he should do with his life. From ordering coffee to buying clothes, he even went to an airport and asked bored businessmen to look over his finances and health care options to decide for him (they were, oddly, very willing to do this). I should do this. But then I think, I would have to decide who and when to ask advice from, which I will inevitably botch.
Even in writing this post I thought, maybe this wouldn't be a good idea to post it for fear of ridicule, - but What Could It Hurt?
Will you make all my decisions for me?
5 comments:
I see one blaring problem with you asking people to make your decisions---that is, you don't like talking to people.
I'll make your decisions. You won't even have to ask.
I guess I could do it for you but I'm just as bad as you are. The only way I can make decisions is by lining up all of the choices and making people eliminate them for me until I'm down to one. I'm not always satisfied with the final decision, but at least it's been made.
I can relate. Especially when it comes to buying something. I like to just do it and get it done and one is as good as another, isn't it? It is not.
Ben (mine) is good at methodically making purchasing decisions. Even if it takes 3 times longer than my poor decision would make.
I bet your Ben does it well too.
I generally find that my first instinct is what I go with in the end after hours of arguing with myself anyway -- so sometimes I just skip the hassle.
In the last class I taught, Cognitive psychology there were two chapters on decision making. Many experiments have been done on this issue and the conclusion is that most people don't make decisions based on all the data because they can't process that much information, so they consider a couple of things they think are important and then go for it. You aren't all that unusual.
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