Summary Chapter 4: Choices and Actions: The Self in Control

Chapter 4: Choices and Actions: The Self in Control
WHAT YOU DO, AND WHAT IT MEANS
The importance of ideas

 What you do depends partly on what it means.
 Reflects the broad theme that inner processes serve interpersonal functions.

Thinking enables people to make use of meaning

 Evolved to help creatures make better choices for guiding their behaviour.

One of the most basic uses of thought is to perform actions mentally before doing them physically.

MAKING CHOICES
 Progress of culture seems to offer people more & more choices, which must be desirable
because people seem to want more choices.

TWO STEPS OF CHOOSING
1. Reducing the full range of choices down to a limited few.
 Involves some risk that a potentially good choice will be rejected without careful
consideration.
 Only way that human mind can deal with a large set of possible choices.
2. Careful comparison of the highlighted options
 Researchers study how someone chooses among a few major options, instead of
focusing on how someone reduces a large set of choices down to a few.
 People perform mental cost-benefit-analysis for each option at the potential good & bad
sides.
 Add these up & pick a option that comes out best.

INFLUENCES ON CHOICE

RISK AVERSION  People are more affected by possible losses than by
possible gains.
 Rational VS irrational bets
 Rational bet conform to what expert statistical risk appraisal
would dictate
 Irrational behaviour = aimed at avoiding losses more often
than pursuing gains.
TEMPORAL DISCOUNTING  What happens right now weighs more heavily than what
might happen in the future.
 Most people choose the immediate reward.
THE CERTAINTY EFFECT  Some features of a decision involve possibilities & odds,
whereas others are certain..
 This tendency to place too much emphasis on definite
outcomes.
KEEPING OPTIONS OPEN  Some people prefer to postpone hard decisions & keep
their options open as long as possible.

, WHY PEOPLE DON’T CHOOSE
Forms of decision avoidance:

STATUS QUO BIAS

 Simple preference to keep things the way they are instead of changing
o The new one is unknown & might have unforeseen problems.
 People often stick with what they have, even when the alternatives might be
better.

OMMISIONS BIAS

 Taking whatever course of action that does not require you to do anything.
o Not taking any form of action.
 Many people will do nothing
 They will do anything that’s the default option

One general theme behind decision avoidance = anticipated regret.

 People avoid making choices & taking actions that they fear they will regret later on.
o People anticipate less regret over doing nothing than over something.
 They also know status qua better than the alternatives, so there is greater
risk of regret if you decide to change than if you stand pat.
 People always pull back from too many choices
o Like to have many options.
 Across many different circumstances, there is no general patterns that
having more options leads to more avoidance of decisions.
 Having too few choices make people reluctant to choose
o We fail to make a selection from a group of options.
 None of the options seems good enough
 Hard to tell which one is the best.



REACTIANCE
 Common notion of ‘reverse psychology’
 People desire to have freedom of choice & therefore have a negative, aversive reaction to
having some of their choices or options taken away by other people or by external forces.
 Reactance = negative feelings people have when their freedom is reduced.

Reactance produces 3 main consequences:

a. Makes you want the forbidden option more and / or makes it seems more attractive.
b. Reactance may make you take steps to try to reclaim the lost option, often describe as ‘
reasserting your freedom’
c. You may feel or act aggressively toward the person who has restricted your freedom.