Making Decisions: We Generate Options Before Deciding

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Which would you prefer: McDonald’s or Chick-fil-A?

You probably made this decision by evaluating each one of these fast food chains (according to your own tastes and cravings), comparing them, and choosing the one with a higher value. This is exactly the kind of question that you might be asked if you were a participant in a study on value-based decision-making.

In fact, most of the scientific literature on this topic makes it seem as if we go about our days deciding between options on a menu. Therefore, there has been a lot of progress in the science of how we evaluate and choose between well-defined alternatives.

Decisions Can Be Open

But most of our decisions are not like that; instead, they are open-ended. When deciding what to say in response to an insult, we don’t get presented with a piece of paper that has two well-crafted retorts on it from which we can choose A or B.

When deciding how to spend our evening, we first have to mentally search for some possibilities before deciding among those possibilities. This process of mentally generating options is therefore really important when it comes to what we ultimately decide to do.

For example, a 2021 study showed that people are much more likely to think of McDonald’s than Chick-fil-A when they are asked to name fast food chains. Consequently, they are more likely to say, “McDonald’s,” when they are asked the open-ended question, “What’s your favorite fast food chain?”

However, people (in this study) were more likely to prefer Chick-fil-A over McDonald’s when they were presented with an exhaustive list of fast food chains and asked to choose their favorite from that list. Since we are not presented with such lists in real life, we may end up eating McDonald’s more often, simply because it comes to mind more easily.

Why Advertising Works

The fact that what we bring to mind plays a powerful role in what we consume is the reason why brands spend millions of dollars on advertising. And the idea that the ease with which we recall things affects our judgments goes back to at least the 1970s—when this “availability heuristic” was discovered.

Despite the importance of what comes to mind by default, researchers are only now starting to look into how we mentally generate options for decision-making, with some interesting preliminary results.

Common and Good

First of all, what comes to mind is a combination of what is common and what is good. In a 2020 study by Bear and colleagues, participants were asked to enter the first number that came to mind in response to different prompts, such as: “number of hours of TV for a person to watch in a day” or “percent of students that cheat on high school exams.”

A separate group of participants got the same prompts but were asked what the ideal number was. Yet another group was given the prompts and asked what they thought the average number was. Across the board, the number that came to mind first was a blend of the ideal number and the average number.

Now, it makes sense for things that are more common to come to mind more easily, but the finding that things that are valuable, or ideal, also come to mind easily is novel and interesting. It suggests that we might prioritize remembering good things so that we can seek them out again later. It also implies that things that we already like are more likely to get chosen, which might partly explain why humans are not the best at exploring new things.

Another Step

A study by Morris and colleagues took this research one step further. They showed that what comes to mind as an option depends on the general value of that thing, whereas what is eventually chosen depends on the value in that specific context. For example, let’s say that you eat meat, but you are having a vegetarian friend over for dinner. What you eventually cook for them will take into account your friend’s dietary preferences, but what will initially come to mind will be all of the things that you usually cook and that you usually enjoy.

In other words, when we face an open-ended decision, our habits create the menu, but our current goals guide what we choose from the menu.

I am excited about this new line of research on what comes to mind and why. Helping us generate options may be one of the most important ways in which our memories impact our decisions. After all, we can’t pick something if it doesn’t occur to us.