When Fast Decisions Go Wrong |
Suppose you're standing at the top of a high ladder, fixing a roof. Suddenly, a tool slips from your grasp, threatening to fall. Before you can think about it, you stretch awkwardly to grab it, slip, and fall to your death.
What happened? Your brain reacted to a specific cue (a slipping object) and made a split-second decision that has worked a million times in your life: grab it before it falls. A natural, intuitive impulse. But it was the wrong move, because it ignored the particular situation you were in. Perched at the top of a ladder, you should have let the tool fall.
Making good decisions takes work and time. But sometimes we don't have the luxury of time. We need to decide right away. This is nothing new. It's a problem our brains, and our ancestors' brains, have been solving for millennia.
This is why your brain constantly searches for fast associations and routines that work. As children, we learn to avoid fire and step away from cliffs without thinking. As adults, we recognize what we like or dislike without much deliberation. We become fast judges of character. We learn to read a room. We even program ourselves to drive cars, operate machinery, or cook complex dishes without checking every step.
Laymen call such acquired skills “intuition.” Psychologists use other names, like “automatic processes.” Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman famously described two ways of thinking in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow. We might also call those intuition and deliberation.
But if something sounds too good to be true, it usually is. There is no perfect way to make good decisions while avoiding hard work. You........