Decoding decision making

Whether you decide by flipping a coin or after careful consideration, there's so much that goes inside your brain goes while you're doing so. And if you think about this further, you begin to decipher the patters of thoughts that go into decision making.

Metacognition, as it is referred to, means thinking about how you think.

As we ponder further, we delve into whether we make decisions by instinct or careful consideration of pros and cons.
As unpleasant as it sounds, Neuroscience has now well established that we tend to be intuitive in our decisions rather than deliberation. This is groundbreaking in some sense since for centuries, scientific community and philosophers have tried their best to support the "deliberation" argument which has also lead to prefer logical decisions over emotional or intuitive ones.

In our quest for optimal decisions we try to force fit into different models and frameworks. This gives us a false notion that the decision we made is a logical one, whereas what we actually do is still use our intuitive judgement.

This article talks about the strategies that can be use for shifting intuitive approach to logical one and hence avoiding decision bias.

How Decision Making can be improved

However there have been studies with empirical evidences which prove the significance of emotions in rational decision making,Antonio Damasio,a prof of neuroscience at USC is an authority on this subject.

Here's a glimpse of  his thoughts:

 

Jonah Lehrer,the author of best seller book "How We Decide",holds similar views.

I shall continue with more details and research evidences in the next post.

After all this research,all I have to say is we need a shift in attitude to be more rational thinkers and not justify our irrational behaviors with logic and evidence.And most importantly attitude is something that can be learnt.