If you're going to be a manager, you're going to make
decisions, so you'd better get comfortable with it. That's
what they tell you in college. For some managers, that's
O.K.; they can do it. For others, it's a struggle, and
few things signal a manager in trouble more clearly than the
words: "I can't decide," when faced with an important
decision.
Researchers have studied decision making for many years, and
slowly but surely they're learning enough to offer helpful
suggestions. The most recent contribution was made by Ziv
Carmon, now at INSEAD Social Science Research Center in
France. Carmon conducted a series of studies and made two
important discoveries.
Imagine shopping for a new car and narrowing your choices to
two very different models, a sports car and a pickup truck.
Each vehicle offers distinct advantages. The sports car
offers fun zipping around town. The pickup offers utility
in helping you accomplish work.
If you think about these choices long enough, you'll begin
to enjoy owning both vehicles in your imagination. One
minute you'll imagine impressing people with your flashy car,
and the next minute you'll feel the relief of having a
vehicle to help you with yard chores. Of course you don't
own either vehicle yet, but with both vehicles offering the
potential to deliver these benefits, your imagination can
give you many enjoyable fantasies.
Then you choose. You buy one of them.
Once you act on your decision, all the benefits of the
rejected choice are lost, and that loss hits some people
pretty hard. They feel bad. They really do. The very
act of deciding did it to them, and this bad feeling can be
strong or weak.
Carmon's findings revealed several conditions of
decision making that make this negative feeling strong, and
two of these are illustrated in the car purchasing decision
described above: taking a long time to decide and elaborating
on the choices.
People elaborate on decision choices when they imagine
themselves enjoying a choice, i.e. zipping around town in the
sports car. We elaborate on vacation choices when we imagine
the sun warming us on the black sands of Diamond Head Beach
or when we feel the cool, thin air in our lungs and see the
high snowy peaks of the Rocky Mountains.
Taking a long time to decide and elaborating on choices can
easily be corrected. We can limit the time we devote to a
decision, and we can discipline our imaginations to limit our
daydreams. However, Carmon discovered three additional
conditions of decision making that also arouse this negative
affect.
Imagine standing before winged mirrors in a clothing store
holding two suits alternately under your chin, one in your
right hand and one in your left. Both are fine choices, but
one will be rejected. Because the rejected choice is close
by, right in your hand, it's more likely that the decision
will arouse some pain. This is the first additional
condition.
Now imagine that you own both suits, but you are giving one
to your son who just happens to be your size. Since you
already own the suit and are parting with it, it's more
likely that you'll find the decision to be painful. This is
the second.
Finally, imagine you are choosing between enjoyable choices,
for example skis or golf clubs, rather than useful ones like
a lawn mower or a snow blower. Since the choices are
enjoyable, it's more likely that the decision will bring
discomfort.
Pain in decision making brings avoidance, so we delay making
decisions, which actually increases the pain. It is in this
way that people become indecisive.
Carmon's final finding revealed a flaw in the process of
evaluating choices: Once a choice is lost, its value seems
to increase. He demonstrated it repeatedly in his
experiments, and he believes this effect is caused by the
negative feelings revealed in his first finding: Because the
rejection of a choice hurts, we must have been wrong in our
evaluation of it. Since we feel pain in its loss, it must
have been a better choice after all.
This process treats feelings as information, information that
is important in the decision process which it is
not, and Carmon warns us against its influence. Feelings are
feelings, and in this case they are aroused from the act of
deciding, not from a mistake in the evaluation process that
preceded it.
Reference: Carmon, Ziv, Klaus Wertenbroch, and Marcel
Zeelenberg (2003) Option Attachment: When Deliberating Makes
Choosing Feel like Losing. Journal of Consumer Research, 30
(June), 15-29.
Business Practice Findings, by James Larsen, Ph.D.
The Pain of Deciding
Research reveals feelings aroused by the act of deciding and explores their impact.