Decisions

Decisions? How do we make them? How do we know they are right?...

      That is the big question in this modern era. In the old times people's lives where planned when they were children. Women got a fine husband and got married early to raise a family, while men worked. It used to be simple since everyone knew their life was planned out for them. Now it is a very different time. Women are doctors, leaders, teachers and many other things and men are the same. Now we have the freedom to choose of how we will end up and what life we will have when we get there. However like in Spider Man, "With great power, comes great responsibility." The power we have grows everyday with the help of our minds and what we have created with them. Our minds have led us to great discoveries like new worlds, and medicine but it has also led to great pain, like war and environmental degradation. Our actions have consequences and that is something that we as people tend to forget.
    How we come around to these decisions is never easy and we are faced with them every day. Small things like what to eat for lunch, if we really have to do the reading for homework and if we can stay up watching TV one more hour. However what some people overlook is that these small decisions are what lead to the larger ones. There are several factors that lead to how we make decisions; including past experiences, age and individual preference, belief, and escalation of commitment. (Dietrich, 2010) Malcolm Gladwell talks about how we come to the decisions we do and uses research to back his claims. According to Gladwell research has shown that many decisions are led by instinct or reasoning. There are times when there is no clear logical decision and those are the moments when past experience or individual preference allows us to arrive at a decision. Though in most situations reasoned analysis works and as it turns out those are the moments when big life decisions come into play. What I found most interesting about his arguments, was when he said that instinct is not always correct. The problem is that we don't know our instincts are wrong until long after the decision has been made, since we rely on them so much and have come to assume they are right. It is a delicate balance because we don't know when its wrong but we have to assume that it usually is.
    Our decisions effect not only ourselves, but this planet, and others around us. We tend to rush to quick decisions that will cause us the least amount of harm and rely to readily on our instincts. We as a human race need to understand this because then we can make better decisions in the future.

Sites
http://www.studentpulse.com/articles/180/decision-making-factors-that-influence-decision-making-heuristics-used-and-decision-outcomes
http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2011/06/14/when-our-intuition-leads-us-to-bad-decisions/