The Stoics say that the only thing that is truly ours is our agency to make a decision. To decide how to react in a situation. We can’t control anything outside ourselves, but we can control our reactions and decisions. That has been very important advice to me.
But what if our decisions are tainted? Do we always have the right information to make the best decisions? Dan Ariely has been studying how people make decisions, specifically in a commerce setting, and has found that how the options are presented has a profound impact on the decisions people make. As a result of this talk, I have added a new guideline to my own “How I make decisions” list. If you are making decisions and are presented by someone else with the options in that decision, always ask yourself “Is there a third way?” or “Are there other choices for this decision which are not here?”. Otherwise you are handing most of the agency for that decision over to the person who designed the question. Don’t do that.
