We may be better at deciding than we think

The British Psychological Society:

A new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, suggests that people may be better at making decisions than they suspect. The study found individuals tend to be very good at judging how much time to spend making their mind up about certain choices.

Andreas Jarvstad of Cardiff University noted previous findings have suggested while adults are usually competent at making smaller decisions, those that require a greater degree of analysis – such as making a big financial selection – pose more problems.

However, Mr Jarvstad and colleagues discovered people are often capable of finding the right balance between spending lots of time on fewer options and rushing through with more decisions.

He stated: “It didn’t seem to matter whether people were doing a low-level or a high-level task – they were equally good at deciding how much time to spend on these tasks.”

According to the authors, humans may not necessarily be intrinsically better at lower-level decision-making than they are at more important ones, as is often assumed.

Read the whole story: The British Psychological Society