1. Psychology of Personal Decision-Making Balanced Judgment

2. Agenda • Balanced Judgment • Recognition • Limited Capacity • Tools • External Memory • Lists • Decision Tables/Trees • De-cluttering • Priming • Heuristics • Decomposition • Worksheet –

3. Balanced Judgment • “Even-Handedness” • Decisions • Assigning appropriate “importance” to different values

4. A snarky meeting • No decision tables • No values on the table written down • How do you best affect outcome of decision? • Deliberating jury + phone call

6. Judgment + numbers = a baby. • Rankings • Ratings

7. Where are we?

8. Lack of Balanced Judgment Recognition • Rarely hear people complain about their memory • Clear inability to do something as a result • Lose Keys = Can’t open door • Failures in judgment are less clear • “I didn’t write all the options down so I picked this one and I’m in the process of synthesizing my happiness with it, so shut up and let me be”

9. Lack of Balanced Judgment: WARNING SIGNS • Single alternatives • Single values • Single futures • All considerations pointing to same alternative • Vacillation • Limited attention • Cognitive overload

10. Are you over-simplfying? • When presented with new information or a new alternative… • Emotionality and resistance? • Irrationality • Ready acceptance • Non-creative thought • Resistance + confusion + cognitive strain • No capacity to deal with this new information among other ideas

11. Limited Capacity • 1. Limited working memory • 2. Poor working memory distinctions

12. Tools to fix the lack of RAM • External Memory • Strings/Rubber Bands • Creating diagrams • Writing • Lists

13. Decision Tables and Trees • Ways to logically organize ideas • Without them, we “satisfice” • Confirmation Bias • Evaluate one alternative at a time until we find a good one • Could overlook important alternatives!

14. Tables and Trees

15. The “Dazzle Effect” and De-Cluttering

16. Priming • Mental “warm up” • Gets intermediate memory chugging • EX: Book read aloud while making cookies

17. Create new ideas? • Stimulus Generalization

18. Keep good ideas? • External Memory

19. Make potential good ideas easier to think about? • Priming

20. Ridding distractions?

21. De-clutter

22. Heuristics • Educated guesses to more EFFICIENTLY help solve problems • Lock-picker example • Tools: • Focus on big picture (breadth based) • Think backwards from the goal (value focused) • Improve your position (sub-goal analysis)

23. Decomposition • Break big problems into smaller pieces • Use the smaller solutions to solve bigger problems • EX: Environmentalists vs. Developers • Develop criteria: #jobs created, building code conformity • Rate importance • Differences Eliminated!

24. Rigorous process, yet simple outcomes Buy gold