Dan Ariely has a post titled “Save your own life.” Here is an excerpt:

If nearly half of premature deaths in the US can be avoided by making better decisions, it is clear to me that it would be worthwhile to spend much more time and effort to disseminate the knowledge we have gained in social science about the main ways in which people fail to make good decisions. It is of course over-optimistic to expect that just helping people to see what mistakes they are likely to make will fix the problem, but personally I would be happy even if it only slightly reduced the number of catastrophic decisions. The next step we need to take is to expand upon the research that examines what kind of methods encourage healthier decision-making and conduct much more research in areas that could help us limit our mistakes. For example, based on research about how people make different decisions when they are sexually aroused we might concentrate on providing comprehensive sexual education that teaches teenagers how to make decisions while in the heat of the moment. Similarly, by understanding how people think we might be able to teach people to enjoy eating fruit and vegetables; how to make exercise part of their ongoing lifestyle; and develop effective smoking cessation programs. And it would also help to remember, in light of this, that every decision counts.

(Matt Groening.)

We are overwhelmed by the amount of choices we are told we have in our culture. The belief, the great American Myth, is that we can have anything, anyone, or be anything we want. But, the hard work and disappointment part of of being, having, choosing, and wanting, that comes with this myth of entitlement seems lost to us. Our choices eventually run up against our limitations.

Choices can become traps that keep us from making decisions and coming to conclusions about who we are. The identity we are creating for ourselves hinges on the number of choices we believe we have, especially when it comes to who and what we want to possess. So in affect, the belief/perception that we have so many choices places decisions we must make now somewhere in the future. At some point we have to act decisively and eliminate both real and perceived choices in order to commit and move forward with our lives.

On this note, the Atlantic has a post by Lane Wallace titled “Toothpaste, Dating, and Data: The Hazards of Too Much Choice.” Here is an excerpt:

So apparently, having too many choices leaves us unable to commit to any given one—in toothpaste, romantic partners, or even 401k investment plans. (Consequently, many brokers, like optometrists, have learned to organize client choices into descending layers of preferences: Which of these three? Which of these next three? And finally, which of these next three?)

But even more disconcerting are the implications of this phenomenon for the information industry. I’ve already noticed it in myself, and in friends who note that they can’t process all the Web sites and bloggers and cable news and opinions out there anymore. Faced with too many choices, they just stop reading, or revert to the sports page. At first, it’s delightful to have all that variety. But too much information from too many sources can be like too many kinds of jam. Or, for that matter, too many threads of music. One musical voice is nice. Four allow for an even more interesting quartet. But at some point, too many voices become noise.

(As noted in the referenced post read Sheena Iyengar‘s book The Art of Choosing and an article by Barry Schwartz titled “Can There Ever Be Too Many Flowers Blooming?“)

The Chronicle of Higher Education has a great article by Daniel J. Simons and Christopher F. Chabris titled “The Trouble With Intuition.” Here is an excerpt:

The idea that hunches can outperform reason is neither unique nor original to Malcolm Gladwell, of course. Most students and professors have long believed that, when in doubt, test-takers should stick with their first answers and “go with their gut.” But data show that test-takers are more than twice as likely to change an incorrect answer to a correct one than vice versa.

Intuition does have its uses, but it should not be exalted above analysis. Intuition can’t be beat when we are deciding which ice cream we like more, which songs are catchier, which politician is most charismatic. The essence of those examples is the absence of any objective standard of quality—there’s no method of analysis that will decisively determine which supermodel is more attractive or which orchestra audition was superior. The key to successful decision making is knowing when to trust your intuition and when to be wary of it. And that’s a message that has been drowned out in the recent celebration of intuition, gut feelings, and rapid cognition.

There is, moreover, one class of intuitions that consistently leads us astray—dangerously astray. These intuitions are stubbornly resistant to analysis, and it is exactly these intuitions that we shouldn’t trust. Unfortunately, they are also the intuitions that we find the most compelling: mistaken intuitions about how our own minds work.

(Make sure to checkout their book The Invisible Gorilla, and Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us.)

The NYT has noteworthy article titled “The Moral Life of Babies” by Paul Bloom who is also the author of the upcoming book How Pleasure Works: The New Science of Why We Like What We Like. Here is an excerpt:

A growing body of evidence, though, suggests that humans do have a rudimentary moral sense from the very start of life. With the help of well-designed experiments, you can see glimmers of moral thought, moral judgment and moral feeling even in the first year of life. Some sense of good and evil seems to be bred in the bone. Which is not to say that parents are wrong to concern themselves with moral development or that their interactions with their children are a waste of time. Socialization is critically important. But this is not because babies and young children lack a sense of right and wrong; it’s because the sense of right and wrong that they naturally possess diverges in important ways from what we adults would want it to be.

(Also checkout Alison Gopnik‘s book The Philosophical Baby: What Children’s Minds Tell Us About Truth, Love, and the Meaning of Life.)

We are not as busy as we think we are. Longer hours, more voice and e-mails, and what seem like increasing demands on our attention and time don’t necessarily translate into we as individuals and as a culture being busier. Many times we use the idea that we are busy as a way of opting out literally and psychologically, meaning because we are busy we can’t commit or aren’t able to put ourselves out there for others or on our own behalf. So we use how busy we are as a line of defense.

Being busy in many circumstances entails a series of choices and the manipulation of emotions and perceptions. But what if not being busy opens us up to having the time to reflect on who we are, what we fear, and the anxiety of actually having time on our hands to do what we really want to do. Afterall, to actually do what we want to do and make the time for others and ourselves requires risk and sacrifice, but all worth taking if we stop thinking and perceiving how busy we are.

(Checkout the photo above from “Cells Vol.1 & Vol.2″ by Jean-Pierre Attal.)

Dr. Atul Gawande, the author of the book The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right, describes the value of developing checklists to deal with complex situations rather than rely mostly on intuition and expertise, although both have tremendous and important value. Implementing a clear criteria for professionals to follow and adhere to and defining each person’s role are fundamental to an individual’s, field’s, and organization’s success. The ability to consistently check in on ourselves individually, as a group, field of practice and/or organization, is how we get it as right as possible.

As an organizational management consultant I witness so many professionals in mental health, social services, the law, and a variety of for and non profit sectors rely on their own intuition and not enough on established procedures, clearly defined roles, and the facts in front of them. Our procedures, roles, and the facts, are the structure we build to remain focused, consistent, and a part of a team of players trying to achieve specific goals. Complexity is always swirling around us, waiting to trap us into thinking we have the answer when at times there are none. Checklists, roles, and recognizing we are a part of a team of people grappling with issues allows us to remain humble in the presence of what we don’t know or haven’t figured out yet.

Dan Ariely has another great post at Wired UK titled “Emotional influences.” Here is an excerpt:

My friend Eduardo Andrade and I wondered if emotions could influence how people make decisions even after the heat or anxiety or exhilaration wears off. We suspected they could. As research going back to Festinger’s cognitive dissonance theory suggests, the problem with emotional decisions is that our actions loom larger than the conditions under which the decisions were made.

When we confront a situation, our mind looks for a precedent among past actions without regard to whether a decision was made in emotional or unemotional circumstances. Which means we end up repeating our mistakes, even after we’ve cooled off. I said that Eduardo and I wondered if past emotions influence future actions but, really, we worried about it. If we were right, and recklessly poor emotional decisions guide later “rational” moments, well then we’re not terribly sophisticated decision-makers, are we?

(Read previous posts from this blog on cognitive dissonance and see the image above at dzna’s photostream.)

Here is an excellent video that describes the video game experience from Nicole Lazzaro, Founder and President, XEODesign. Check out the “Facial Action Coding” theory and view the site of one of the original founder’s of it Dr. Paul Ekman she brings up in her presentation.

Another great lesson from Dan Ariely.

Finding who we belong with and where we need to be is in many ways a matter of choices with an eye on our fate. I mean fate in the sense that our family, friends, peers and community combined with the actual physical place we live and move in the world all determine what will happen to us. This is why we should view our life in terms of who we are surrounded by and where we call home as a series of choices, recognizing that we have to live with the family we are given and the place we were born, but we don’t have to stay with them or there if in doing so we are not allowed to be who we are. If we build this kind of awareness of family, friends, peers, and place as our reality and central to our identity, but not necessarily who we want to stay with or where we want to be, then we can make the kinds of choices that reflect who we are and where we really belong. Read more…