How to Choose (Part 1)
Three paradoxical principles
This post is part of a miniseries. Part 2 can be found here, and Part 3 can be found here.
The door itself makes no promises. / It is only a door. –Adrienne Rich, “Prospective Immigrants, Please Note”
Every once in a while, a piece I’m working on will grow all kinds of roots and side limbs, and I’ll realize it is in fact not one post but a thicket of highly connected ideas. The last time this happened was a year ago when a post on learning spawned a miniseries on the myth of curriculum. This time, the seed was decisions.
Part of what makes decisions such a meandering, hard-to-pin-down subject is that they are not the purview of any one discipline. Economists will offer the wisdom of cost-benefit analyses and expected value calculation. Cognitive and social scientists will help reveal and mitigate your biases. Philosophers will cut to fundamental questions of what we ought to value in the first place.1 In the end, everyone must reach their own synthesis of these traditions: We all choose.
Inevitably, the multidisciplinary nature of decisions leads to some tension between different approaches—frames that make choosing counterintuitive at best and sometimes outright unsolvable. Let’s begin with three of these paradoxical principles.
Big Choices Are Not Hard Choices
This idea comes from philosopher Ruth Chang, whose advice on Lifekit is one of my favorite bite-sized forays into decision-making. Often, when we hear the phrase “hard choice” we assume that the decision in question is both very fraught (i.e., because of incomplete information, lack of consensus, or subjectivity) and very impactful (i.e., it will have major long-term ramifications). Chang’s key insight is that these two qualities are actually separable: Sometimes, difficult choices are utterly banal, and sometimes life-altering ones can be made with little thought.
Of course, our quintessential tough choices sit at the intersection of big and hard: We agonize over our careers, finances, and love lives because we rightly understand that these decisions are consequential and that we are navigating under great uncertainty. This paralysis can make our normal selection processes go haywire, leading us to either throw reason out the window or hyperfixate on particulars of the decision that shouldn’t really move the needle.
Chang’s typology reminds us that big, hard choices actually have a reference class in the little hard decisions we make all the time, usually without too much trouble; that these choices are not hard because they have big consequences but rather because of epistemic or social factors that could be present in decisions of any size. Once we put these choices in their proper context, we can begin to relax about making them.
Hard Choices Are Easy Choices
This formulation—which I first heard articulated by poker player and cognitive scientist Annie Duke—might seem at odds with the idea that big choices are hard choices, but in fact it is a corollary of the same idea.
The logic goes like this: When you find yourself in a hard decision—be it choosing a career or ordering an appetizer of an unfamiliar menu—the defining feature of the choice is that one option does not dominate the other. One career might be higher paying but less meaningful than the other; one appetizer is tastier but less healthy than the other. Or as Ruth Chang puts it:
A hard choice is characterized by the options being pretty different…but they're on a par. And on a par means one isn't better than the other, but nor are they equally good because if they were equally good, then the right thing to do is to flip a coin between them.
While Chang is correct that it would be unwise to flip a coin here,2 there is a profound liberation in recognizing that in a true hard choice, neither option is objectively “correct.” Depending on what you value, it would be valid to choose either one; you wouldn’t be dismissed as a fool for going with one option over the other. (Contrast this with a paradigmatic easy choice—say, between two identical pairs of shoes at $100 or at $200; in this case there are no tradeoffs—the first option just offers the exact same outcome at a lower cost.)
In this sense, when you truly internalize the fact that either option in a hard choice is correct, it ironically becomes “easy”—not because one option dominates the other but rather because no amount of prayer, effort, or hand-wringing will magically reveal the answer. Just make the best decision you can with the information available to you, and move on!
I don’t mean to suggest that deliberation is completely futile or that big, hard choices don’t matter—just that the greater uncertainty you’re operating under, the less useful it is to agonize over the decision. It’s sort of like being picked to participate in one of those half-court shot competitions. The odds of winning (i.e, by analogy, unequivocally nailing the decision) may be incredibly slim; but the choice you have to make—to the extent it’s even a choice—is simple: Just heave the ball towards the basket, and hope for the best.3
Good Choices Feel Bad
Or, to put a bit of a finer point on it: The better your decision process is, the less likely you are to have a feeling of certainty and satisfaction in your choice.
This principle operates at both an individual and group level. For individual decision-making, we can look to the long-standing body of research on “maximizers versus satisficers.” As their names imply, maximizers are people who strive for the best possible outcome in every choice; satisficers, by contrast, take a “good enough” approach, going with an option that is above their threshold.4
Unsurprisingly, maximizers do tend to get objectively better results than satisficers—but the experience much more angst in the process. In one well-known study of this, for example, maximizing college seniors ended up with salaries that were on average 20% higher than satisficers; yet they reported greater unhappiness both during and after the search process.
In group contexts, the key distinction is not between maximizers and satisficers but between the wisdom of crowds and groupthink. This is the difference between decision processes that operate as an aggregation of independent individuals and ones that operate as a collective endeavor.
When decisions are made in public—say, in a group brainstorming session—psychosocial dynamics tend to push people toward a consensus view. This occurs both for conscious reasons (e.g., not wanting to contradict your boss) and unconscious ones (e.g., people are anchored by the first person who speaks). By contrast, when you safeguard against social influences, individuals’ judgments will be noisy—i.e., contradictory—but the average of these judgments will be more accurate than if you had allowed them to deliberate together. While more reliable, this approach can create some awkwardness or tension as some individuals’ judgments are ignored or overridden.
Looking at this picture of (social) cognition, it’s tempting to conclude that lower satisfaction/consensus is just the price we ought to pay for making better choices; I think that’s the wrong takeaway. As I’ll argue in Part 2, there are actually many good reasons to privilege satisficing (or groupthink) over maximization (or wisdom of the crowds). The trick lies in matching the right approach to the right kinds of choices.
I began this post with a couple lines from Adrienne Rich’s brilliant poem, “Prospective Immigrants, Please Note”: The door itself makes no promises. / It is only a door. I think that sometimes when we face a Big, Hard Choice™, we forget this simple insight; we trace a lifetime forward from a moment, extrapolate whole universes from a single point—forgetting that the decision is ultimately just one decision: nothing more, nothing less.
Instead, regardless of the stakes, we would do well to remember that we make choices all the time, and that there is only so much we can do to get them right (or, more often “right”). The three principles outlined in this post—big choices ≠ hard choices; hard choices = easy choices; choose well → feel worse—are, I think, the building blocks of a decision-making framework that is both rational and grounded in the messy reality of how our minds work.
In the remainder of this miniseries, I’ll offer some protocols and practical advice on how to apply these principles—and, hopefully, resolve some of the inherent contradictions in the process.
For the purposes of this miniseries, I’ll be taking as a given that humans do in fact have the capacity to make choices—a.k.a. free will. (Whether or not our lives are determined is a question above my pay grade, but for all practical purposes it certainly does seem that our conscious experience is one of making choices in the world.)
Actually, as we’ll see in Part 2, it might not be so wrong—it’s just that the reason flipping a coin works might be different than you think.
You’ll get it wrong a lot of the time, but this is inevitable in hard choices. In many situations, even when you make the right choice, you won’t get the perfect outcome. Here’s Annie Duke again, with a restaurant example:
You get the [bad] chicken. What's the first thing you say? “I made a mistake.” But that's the wrong use of the word mistake. What you really mean is, “Man, I wish I were omniscient and I had a time machine. Then I would have known this chicken was going to be bad, and I would have chosen something different.” But you're not omniscient and you don't have a time machine.
“Satisfice” was originally a portmanteau of “satisfy” and “suffice,” but seems to have entered into mainstream usage on its own.