People and decision making

Every day, people are inundated with decisions, big and small. Understanding how people arrive at their choices is an area of cognitive psychology that has received attention. Theories have been generated to explain how people make decisions, and what types of factors influence decision making in the present and future. In addition, heuristics have been researched to understand the decision making process.

Several factors influence decision making. These factors, including past experience, cognitive biases, age and individual differences, belief in personal relevance, and an escalation of commitment, influence what choices people make. Understanding the factors that influence decision making process is important to understanding what decisions are made. That is, the factors that influence the process may impact the outcomes.

Many types of heuristics have been developed to explain the decision making process; essentially, individuals work to reduce the effort they need to expend in making decisions and heuristics offer individuals a general guide to follow, thereby reducing the effort they must disburse. Together, heuristics and factors influencing decision making are a significant aspect of critical thinking.  

People make decisions about many things. They make political decisions; personal decisions, including medical choices, romantic decisions, and career decisions; and financial decisions, which may also include some of the other kinds of decisions and judgments. Quite often, the decision making process is fairly specific to the decision being made. Some choices are simple and seem straight forward, while others are complex and require a multi-step approach to making the decisions.

Factors that Influence Decision Making

There are several important factors that influence decision making. Significant factors include past experiences, a variety of cognitive biases, an escalation of commitment and sunk outcomes, individual differences, including age and socioeconomic status, and a belief in personal relevance. These things all impact the decision making process and the decisions made.

Past experiences can impact future decision making. Juliusson, past decisions influence the decisions people make in the future. It stands to reason that when something positive results from a decision, people are more likely to decide in a similar way, given a similar situation. On the other hand, people tend to avoid repeating past mistakes. This is significant to the extent that future decisions made based on past experiences are not necessarily the best decisions. In financial decision making, highly successful people do not make investment decisions based on past sunk outcomes, rather by examining choices with no regard for past experiences; this approach conflicts with what one may expect.

In addition to past experiences, there are several cognitive biases that influence decision making. Cognitive biases are thinking patterns based on observations and generalizations that may lead to memory errors, inaccurate judgments, and faulty logic. Cognitive biases include, but are not limited to: belief bias, the over dependence on prior knowledge in arriving at decisions; hindsight bias, people tend to readily explain an event as inevitable, once it has happened; omission bias, generally, people have a propensity to omit information perceived as risky; and confirmation bias, in which people observe what they expect in observations.

In decision making, cognitive biases influence people by causing them to over rely or lend more credence to expected observations and previous knowledge, while dismissing information or observations that are perceived as uncertain, without looking at the bigger picture. While this influence may lead to poor decisions sometimes, the cognitive biases enable individuals to make efficient decisions with assistance of heuristics.

A Beautiful Mind is a movie based on the life of mathematician John Nash and his battle with schizophrenia.

Nash developed the first symptoms of schizophrenia in the 1950s. He later made significant contributions to the field of mathematics, including the math of decision-making and the extension of game theory. His struggles with this mental disorder and its effects on his family were made into a film that has aroused questions regarding schizophrenia.

Schizophrenia is a chronic mental disorder that affects a person’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. This disorder also causes people to feel out of touch with reality. While there are multiple symptoms linked to schizophrenia, the most common include hallucinations, delusions, and difficulties concentrating.

Schizophrenia is a chronic and severe mental illness that can have a detrimental impact on anyone’s life. Without proper care, an individual can lose their life to this disorder

Lack of Emotion

Another common sign of schizophrenia is a change in how a person speaks. In many scenes, including the one where John tells Charles that he “doesn’t like people much,” he shows very little emotion when he speaks. This is frequently portrayed throughout the movie.

Impact of this Disease on a Person’s Life

People with schizophrenia have trouble differentiating fiction from reality, which is accurately portrayed in a scene where John gives a speech about his current research. During this scene, John sees men in suits and believes them to be soviet spies who have been ordered to capture him. Instead, they are really men sent to take him to a psychiatric hospital. John’s delusions advance, causing him to believe that he’s actually working for the Department of Defense under an agent named William Parcher. Eventually, his wife was able to prove to him that none of his letters to the agent were ever opened and that William Parcher never existed.

Duel was another movie I got was Duel.Duel is the ultimate road rage movie. The story follows David (Dennis Weaver), a businessman who makes the mistake of overtaking a psychotic trucker on the highway. This leads to a cat-and-mouse chase on the open road, as the truck driver wants to make David pay for his rude road antics. There’s a David vs. Goliath parable in there too, as it’s a tale of an underdog being forced to overcome a giant. In this case, the giant is a massive tanker truck.

 

Duel is essentially a story about a man being terrorized by a stranger simply for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. David’s wrongdoing is something that every driver is guilty of, but Spielberg mines the scenario for maximum effect.

 

The film focuses on visual storytelling and sound to create its cinematic mayhem. It’s a silent movie on steroids, with Hitchcockian levels of suspense and plenty of psychological horror on display. The truck is presented as an overbearing monster

 

 

Some individual differences may also influence decision making. Research has indicated that age, socioeconomic status (SES), and cognitive abilities influences decision making. In addition, older people may be more overconfident regarding their ability to make decisions, which inhibits their ability to apply strategies. Finally, with respect to age, there is evidence to support the notion that older adults prefer fewer choices than younger adult. Age is only one individual difference that influences decision making. 

Over and above past experiences, cognitive biases, and individual differences; another influence on decision making is the belief in personal relevance. When people believe what they decide matters, they are more likely to make a decision.  Individuals’ voting patterns, and concluded that people will vote more readily when they believe their opinion is indicative of the attitudes of the general population, as well as when they have a regard for their own importance in the outcomes. People vote when they believe their vote counts.