«We learn the most from mistakes»
Mrs Roebers, research shows that adults are often not good decision-makers either. Why is that?
Many different cognitive functions are required to make a good decision: You have to keep the desired goal in mind and refrain from jumping to the first possible solution. You need to keep all the arguments in favour of and against a solution in your head at the same time and think about intermediate steps towards the goal.
It is also important to pause again and again and consider whether you are really getting closer to the decision this way. Every single one of these information processes is complex, and then you have to coordinate everything with each other. This demands all our cognitive reserves, often beyond the limits of our capacity.
And then we make do with bad decisions?
In any case with those in which we all too often lose sight of our goal or modify our original goal as soon as we come up against obstacles. When we have a lot of information to consider, we tend to arbitrarily select the details that we consider most important for the decision because we are effectively overwhelmed by the flood of information .
It helps to realise that many decisions can be reversed or at least modified.
Decisions are particularly difficult when the consequences lie in the distant or even uncertain future. For example, it is common knowledge that smoking or drinking too much alcohol is not good, and yet it is so difficult for us all to make healthier lifestyle choices today in order to be better off in ten years' time.
Can you learn to make better decisions?
Yes, you can adopt various strategies for this. For example, divide the individual aspects into steps and then solve the problem step by step. Or you can collect pros and cons in an open-ended way, write them down in a table and then assess each argument in terms of how important it is to you. This allows you to prioritise and reduce the wealth of information to a manageable level. It also helps to realise that many decisions can be reversed or at least modified. In fact, we often learn the most from mistakes.
