By Jonah Berger, PhD, University of Pennsylvania
We often get sucked into trivial decisions. Here are three ways to avoid the painful phenomenon of “decision quicksand”.
Have you ever agonized over which restaurant entrée to order? Which shade of white to paint the kitchen? Which flight to purchase? If so, you’re not alone. You’ve been caught in something my colleague and I call “Decision Quicksand.” Not only does it lead to wasted time, but it also makes people unhappy and less satisfied with their choice.
This article originally appeared in Professor Jonah Berger’s personal blog,
It starts simply enough: You’re choosing a vacation destination or a restaurant to go for dinner; you’re relaxed, happy, and ready to knock it out. It’s a decision, but a pretty trivial one. You’ll quickly pick something and move on.
But then you begin comparing options. The Italian place has great food, but didn’t someone say that the new Greek place was worth checking out? What about that Sushi place you like? It’s close by, but you had to wait a while last time to be seated. You go back-and-forth. You compare each dimension one by one, weighing the benefits of each.
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Soon you’re starting to get frustrated. Each option has positives and negatives. Both seem good in some ways and bad in others. Suddenly a choice that seemed unimportant starts to feel more weighty and consequential. What if you get it wrong? Will the meal be terrible? Will you wish you went somewhere else?
Before you know it you’ve spent 45 minutes scanning menus online…and your stomach is starting to grumble. You’re struggling and struggling but the harder you work the more you get sucked in. You’re trapped and you can’t seem to find a way out.
If something like this has happened to you, don’t worry. It doesn’t mean you are bad at decision making. Decision quicksand happens to everyone. The reason it happens is less about you and more about the situation.
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We expect important decisions, like whether to switch jobs or buy a house, to be difficult. After all, they’re important. They require and deserve careful deliberation and the weighing of alternatives.
We don’t expect the same difficulty, however, for less important decisions. Which entrée to choose? That should be easy, like a walk in the park.
But unimportant decisions frequently end up being more difficult than we expect. Often there are many options to sift through or conflicting tradeoffs on different dimensions. This unexpected difficulty leads us to think that the decision must be more important than we originally thought. If the decision is this difficult it must be worth my time and effort.
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Thus we devote more energy to the decision, collect more information, and sink deeper into the quicksand. We start exerting more effort and the decision comes to seem more important. We’ve spent an hour on a trivial decision and we can’t figure out a way to escape.
Want to avoid the quicksand? Here are 3 simple ways out.
- Pre-Commit. Decide how much time you want to spend in advance. I’m going to pick a flight in 10 minutes, period. Set a timer. Once it goes off, you have to choose whichever option you were looking at last.
- Take A Break. Decision quicksand leads us to be so narrowly focused on a choice that we think the world revolves around that decision. But few choices are that important. Stepping away for a few minutes and doing something else will provide some needed perspective and help you see whether a particular decision is really worth the effort.
- Satisfy. People often maximize, trying to find the best possible option. But in many cases, any of the options would make you quite satisfied. You’d have a wonderful time in either Disney World or Hawaii. Stop deliberating and move on with your life. Flip a coin. Either option is great.
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Next time you find yourself hopelessly stuck in an unimportant decision, stop struggling for a moment, and take a step back. What you thought was a big deal probably isn’t.
Common Questions About Making Decisions
There are five major steps to making good decisions: Identify a goal, collect information to use in comparison of outcomes, evaluate all consequences, make the decision, and follow through with the decision you chose.
It is generally thought that the three types of decision-making are tiered into personal decisions, business decisions, and consumer decisions.
There are four styles of decision-making that affect every type of decision: behavioral, analytical, conceptual, and directive.
Routine decision-making is generally meant as the small things: the basic decisions we make day to day with little involvement such as whether to read the newspaper or what to have for lunch.
