The book, Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior, by Ori Brafman and his brother, Rom Brafman dives into the way that we make decisions. Why do humans make the horrible decisions we do when logic would tell us to act otherwise? There are several psychological influences that sway our decision-making ability according to the Brafman brothers. The authors look at several different factors, with a lot of fascinating and logic-breaking examples. This book will help you understand the decisions you make. In many circumstances times when logic would dictate that we take a certain action, we take the opposite. To illustrate, just ask yourself why you have stayed so long in a doomed relationship? Why was it so hard to sell a stock that has lost much of its value…or to sell your house if it will be for less than you paid for it? In their book, Sway, Ori and Rom Brafman explore our decision making process and what influences our behavior. Hence, the subtitle, The Pull of Irrational Behavior is used.…
Rational thinking and logic-driven thinking and will aid you in keeping in touch with reality and being in control of yourself. You can observe someone’s decision-making skills based on this, since most of your decisions portray your Ego. The Ego is a median for The Superego and The Id, while wanting to still pleasure the desires of The Id, but in a rational way that The Superego would allow. However, some people’s Ego may lean more towards either the side of The Id or the side of The Superego, therefore making our view of them and judgement of them possibly different from most people, but understanding what drives a person’s behavior will help us humanize them.…
In chapter 8 of Jonah Lehrer’s The Decisive Moment, the author illustrates how Michael Binger, a professional poker player makes his decisions. Lehrer asserts that “the only thing that separates the experts from the amateurs is the quality of their decisions”(pg210,p1). “The Art of Cards”(pg219,p2) examines the techniques used by Binger and how poker players “master the game”(pg219,p3) and explains how “The Power of Unconscious Thought”(pg221,p4) can lead to better decision making. “Using Both Sides of the Brain”(pg227,p2) sketches out a taxonomy of decision making, applying the knowledge of the brain to the real world(pg232,p3).…
Smart thinkers welcome their intuitions but when making complex decisions they gather as much information as possible and then take time to let their two track mind process the information.…
A general decision making criterion involves several factors. What this journal focuses on is the influence of others’ decisions on one’s own, namely, the act of “looking up and looking around”. In any given situation it is human nature to first “look up”- that is, see what a more knowledgeable person (such as the boss) is doing, and then take a decision as to how one would act. The second option is to “look around”- that is, see what one’s colleagues and peer are doing and follow suit. The author also writes on how “decision-making paralysis” hits everyone from middle range managers to even the top managers and CEO. When presented with a problem, the mind goes blank and the person the question is directed to is stuck in a rut. Either they don’t know how to solve the problem and are looking for someone else to take the burden; or they are apprehensive to make any decisions because they might fail. Many managers suffer severe anxiety that their incapability might be found out. That’s why senior managers are more preferred as they have a greater hold over making a decision based on their gut instinct. Decision-making is not only the manager’s headache, it also depends on the structure and progress of an organization. Many managers are pushed to make decisions within a short time, and that too decisions based on information passed on from the junior levels. On several occasions the information may not be particularly correct and that would result in a decision made on unreal situations. A manager’s worst dream: a wrong decision. Many a times, there is that one person in the organization who has to take the blame and walk away. This happens regularly in corporate mishaps. In order to be successful in an organization, the author claims that one has to have quick thinking abilities and to move forward fast.…
Most people think that greed is bad. Some people may think it is good. But most of all it is bad because it can cause bad things to happen. There are many negative aspects about greed like, why is greed bad, what about greed, and main reasons about greed. Why is greed bad?…
We make hundreds of decisions a day, some decisions are so important that they can determine the course of our lives. There are two ways a decision could be made, the average normal decision, and sometimes were presented with a dangerous gamble that takes a quite a bit of courage to accept. In the movie Jaws, everybody said that to capture or kill the monster of a shark “Jaws” it would be nearly impossible and only someone crazy would attempt to do such a thing. But it took an…
Decision-making is an essential activity for managers and leaders (Hoff, 2004). However, it should be noted that the process of decision-making is important for all individuals in their lives (Holistic Management, 2000). Harris (2009) stated that bad decision-making from choosing incorrect alternatives results in anxiety, uncomfortable feelings, and time wasting.…
* Leon, being an avid researcher on decisions showed that decision alternatives are conflicting forces, and through experiments the interaction of conflicting tendencies could be understood as motivational foreshadowing of people’s behavior. The habit of these conflicting tendencies allows great hypothesis on the end result of the behavior.…
Today’s generation is growing up in a world full of amazing new technology and a place where information is only a keyboard click away. Technology is everywhere now, which is an extremely easy distractor from the important things in life that should take precedent over surfing the web or updating a Facebook status. As amazing and helpful as technology is, it hinders children’s focus, provides too much instant gratification and is a huge distraction.…
Every day we are faced with decisions. The quality of them often determines the pattern of our lives. There’s the question: “How to make the best decision?” Although the majority of people are used to saying that decisions should be based on the long-term gathering of information, comparing moral and ethics rules and human prejudices and bias, Malcolm Gladwell offers another point of view in his best-seller, in 2005, “Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking”. The book explains a decision-making process, namely the value of the first two seconds of an action. In other words, an importance of rapid cognition – the kind of thinking that happens in a blink on an eye (http://suite101.com, n.d.). Initially, the readers may consider that the book is about intuition. Indeed, the word intuition is not suitable to “Blink” because intuition describes emotional reactions, gut feelings. Thus thoughts and solutions do not seem entirely rational. That’s why people in Kazakhstan should ponder deeply before relying on intuition. According to Gladwell’s definition, “Rapid cognition is just a process of thinking that goes faster and operates a little more mysteriously than the kind of deliberate, conscious decision-making that we usually associate with “thinking”… what goes on in these first two seconds is perfectly rational.” (www.gladwell.com/blink, n.d.). So the reader should not confuse intuition with “rapid cognition”.…
Very often the reason for bad decision-making is because of errors or miss-steps in the decision making process, as I have briefly noted. However, sometimes it is mind of the decision maker who is at fault in contrast to the decision making process. Hammond et al has revealed that we use unconscious routines to cope with the complexity inherent in most decisions. These routines are known as “heuristics”. Heuristics can benefit in many situations but in contrast can be misperceived. Another trap is the irrational anaomlies in our thinking. Both flaws are engraved into our thinking process and consequentially we fail to recognize them and ignore them. Pyschological traps can undermine the most carefully considered decisions, and may be even more dangerous than the eight most common errors in decision making listed in Smart Choice’s. “The best protection against these traps is awareness”.…
The decision is an essential part of all aspects of our daily life, from the simplest to the most complex. When we wake up in the morning and go to wash our faces, this is a decision when we choose specific food to eat. this is a decision when we choose a specific program to follow on television when we choose what to study , who will marry, the names of our children ...etc These are all decisions. Simple decisions may be taken quickly, spontaneously and routinely or may be difficult and complex and require a lot of study and reasoning before you take…
All throughout our lives we make choices. Some are rather inconsequential, such as which cereal we decide to eat for breakfast in a particular morning, whereas others can leave a profound impact on our lives, such as which university we attend and get a degree from. These important decisions can lead to anything from dire consequences to a beneficial future, and the person making the decision cannot know the results until they take the risk and head down the path they choose.…
Temporal Myopia is our brains inability to make long term decisions. Our country is in massive debt. The polar ice caps are melting because of our own poor environmental decisions. The healthcare system in the United States is bias and out of control. Obesity has become as widespread as an epidemic. Instead of pouring money into our education system, which in the long term would benefit the youth and future leaders of our country, we are getting ourselves further into debt by putting this money towards a war which was rushed into in the first place over insufficient reasoning. This article used modes and scenarios to better illustrate the reasoning that occurs when a person is making a decision.…