In a world overflowing with choices — from what to eat for breakfast to which career path to pursue — decision-making has become an ever-present obstacle for most. Research from UC Berkeley’s Department of Psychology has demonstrated a new way that people can overcome this obstacle, by changing the way they approach their decisions.
This innovative approach, detailed in a study recently published in Nature Human Behaviour, focuses on altering the way people think of the relationship between their options.
“When people choose between different options, they think of those options as being in direct competition with one another - choosing one option feels like sacrificing the others," said Psychology Professor Amitai Shenhav, who co-authored the paper. "This can feel like a prolonged tug-of-war playing out inside of our heads, and that can be stressful.
Shenhav and his co-authors, including lead author UC Berkeley researcher Xiamin Leng, tested whether they could make choices easier for people by making the choice feel less like a competition. To do this, they showed participants sets of consumer products and asked them to choose their favorite one.
For some of these choices, the decision ended there. For other choices, participants were told that they would subsequently have the opportunity to choose as many other products as they wanted from the set.
The researchers found that in the second case – where choosing one option didn’t exclude the possibility of choosing others – participants made that first choice more efficiently and experienced less stress. The results showed that making decisions in this “inclusive” fashion-led participants to choose faster, in a way that was comparable to putting them under time pressure, but without the added stress.
While the study focuses on situations where a person can return to options that weren’t their first choice, the authors hope to test the implications of these findings for a broader set of real-world choices.
"Whether you are choosing an outfit or how to approach writing an essay, you often have the ability to revisit that choice," Shenhav said. "Our findings suggest that reminding people that this is the case will encourage them to view their options as independent opportunities rather than as competitors, and that this in turn will lead to faster and less taxing decisions.”