Thinking, Fast and Slow (Part 4)

Intro: So Many Choices

In your life, you make a plethora of decisions every day without even realising that you even make them. Your System 1 can handle the decisions that we have to make in our day. As you progress through life more decisions are taken by System 1 and you are forced to make those decisions more and more often. However, life often forces you to make hard decisions; decisions in which loss is inescapable or appears to be. In these situations making decisions can seem impossible. There are more factors or individual choices than you can even comprehend or more commonly, your actions are limited. Each possible choice comes with its benefits and drawbacks and the fear of making the wrong decision can add to the stress, making it difficult to feel confident in our choices. So what do you do?

While you look for the answer to that question, your System 1 is already looking for shortcuts and patterns, which can result in biases like overconfidence, anchoring, and availability heuristics. You will be prone to overestimate the likelihood of an unlikely event or underestimate the likelihood of a likely event. It can also rely too heavily on the first piece of information you receive. However this is not your average decision and when your System 1 recognises that, your System 2 reluctantly activates. However, even System 2 can struggle with decision-making. It is limited by cognitive overload, where too much information or too many options can overwhelm its ability to process everything thoroughly. Additionally, System 2 is influenced by the same biases that affect System 1, making it difficult to completely overcome the flaws in our thinking. So when you make a choice, how do you know if you even made the right choice? What do you do?