How to Make Better Decisions Faster

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Imagine you are faced with two options for where to attend college:

1. UC Berkeley

2. UCLA

Now imagine you have weighed the pros and cons. But you still have difficulty deciding. You decide to give it more time, and reflect a bit more.

Research on decision-making suggests you might be making a mistake.

People Can Spend Too Much Time on Simple Decisions

Consider the findings of a fascinating paper titled “Irrational time allocation in decision-making.” At the start of the study, participants viewed images of different snack foods and indicated how much they would be willing to pay for each item. Next, participants looked at images that contained pairs of different foods (e.g. the screen would display a Kit Kat and a Mars Bar). They had to choose which item they preferred to eat at the end of the study.

The researchers found that participants spent more time choosing between options that were roughly equal in value than between options in which there was a large value disparity. “Value” here means how much participants said they would be willing to pay for each item at the start of the study. In other words, people took longer than they should have when deciding between two equally appealing choices.

When shown an unpleasant food alongside a favored food, participants in the study chose quickly. When shown a favored food alongside another favored food, people took a while. But this is irrational. If two choices are equally appealing (as rated by the decision-maker), then the decision shouldn’t take so long. After all, you’ll receive the same enjoyment no matter what you choose.

When making decisions, we spend too much time choosing between options that are equally pleasant.

In another study, participants viewed a series of images that contained two fields of dots (e.g., 20 dots on one side of the screen and 10 dots on the other). In each trial, they were shown a different image with two fields of dots. Participants had to decide which side had more dots. They were paid based on how many trials they got right. The more trials they responded to, the more they got paid.

In trials in which the number of dots on each side of the screen was nearly equal, participants took significantly longer to choose than when there was a clear disparity. Again, this is irrational. Participants would have made more money if they had just quickly made a decision and moved to the next trial.

In some of the trials, the researchers imposed artificial time constraints. Participants made decisions faster and thus made more money when researchers told them they had a limited amount of time to respond in each trial.

The researchers conclude, “People apparently misallocate their time, spending too much on those choice problems in which the relative reward is low.”

Why Decision-Making Can Be Difficult

Let’s go back to the example at the beginning. If choosing between an expensive and unknown for-profit university and UC Berkeley, then the choice is probably easy. We wouldn’t spend much time deciding.

Now imagine choosing between UC Berkeley and UCLA. Many people would, even after weighing the pros and cons and figuring that they would enjoy the experience at both colleges, spend a painstaking amount of time on this decision.

Or take vacations. If your choices for a holiday are Barcelona or Pyongyang, the choice is (probably) easy. If deciding between Barcelona or Rome, maybe this should be easy too.

Relatedly, there is research suggesting that people take longer to distinguish between two numbers when there is a small discrepancy than when there is a large one. For example, people take longer to determine which number is larger between 47 vs. 49 than for 12 vs. 35. Researchers sometimes call this “numerical discrimination.”

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A recent paper titled “The Adaptive Value of Numerical Competence” describes the idea: “Similar numerical values are difficult to discriminate, but discrimination performance is systematically enhanced the more different (or distant) two values are (an effect called ‘numerical distance effect’).”

Perhaps this tendency is one reason why people take so long to choose between two options with roughly equal payoffs. In the same way that we have difficulty distinguishing numbers that are nearly equal in value, we also have difficulty choosing between options that are roughly equally pleasant.

I am curious whether this works in the opposite direction—whether duration of decision-making implies that options are equal. When options are roughly equal, people tend to take a long time to decide. Does this suggest that if people take a long time to decide, then options are roughly equal? Maybe in some instances, the longer we take to make a decision, the less it matters what we actually choose.

Another way to think about decisions comes from George MacGill: “When presented with two options, choose the one that brings about the greater amount of luck.” So even if two choices appear to be roughly the same, it may be wise to go with the one that has the possibility of a larger upside.