At its heart, most rhetoric is about how decisions get made. Ideally, people would respond rationally to information they receive and reach the best possible decision. But you’ve probably had experiences where the person you were interacting with seemed “immune” to reason. Sometimes this is due to differing value systems, but other times this is due to the heuristics we use to process information.
You can think of heuristics as a set of mental procedures or shortcuts for making decisions–often on the fly. You have a heuristic, for instance, that lets you weigh the competing variables for deciding where to eat lunch; you might weight price and healthful options most highly, and rate proximity, wait time, and decor somewhat lower. For many decisions, we simply don’t have the time to research all the options exhaustively. When buying a new car, our decision to prefer one that we see as stylish, or exciting, or a good value, or safe is also driven by mental shortcuts, and these are an amalgam of perceptions of friends’ attitudes, presumed likelihood of accidents, brand reputation (marketing), etc.
Here at Penn State, Smeal College of Business professor Meg Meloy has found that when deciding among multiple options, we make an initial “best guess” as to what our decision will be, and then look for evidence that confirms that initial gut reaction. We will then tend to discount evidence supporting other choices–not give them their full value. We think that we’re processing information logically, but in most situations that’s simply not how it happens. This is a variation of what psychologists call confirmation bias. (David McRaney has an entertaining, well researched explanation at his blog: You Are Not So Smart.)
Did you just think to yourself, “Sure, this is something that OTHER people do, but surely I don’t do this”? Congratulations, you’ve just demonstrated another heuristic, call the self-serving bias. We tend to discount anything that challenges our sense of self worth, rationalizing it away. And when things go wrong, we tend to explain it based on external circumstances. (We don’t always give other people the same benefit of the doubt, though.)
Why bring this up? As we look at deliberating between choices in the coming weeks, our goal is to be intentional (deliberate) about our beliefs and preferences. While the issues are too complex to apply something as rigorous as the scientific method, carefully questioning our own assumptions really can help us reach better decisions. So do your best to check your biases at the door.