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This seems rational and predictable. It would be wild if people spent more time evaluating decisions between vastly different values. “People spend too much time” on choice paralysis because they’re overwhelmed by too many hard to distinguish things.
I don't think this is a paradox at all. If an option is perceived to be significantly better, then the decision can be made quickly. Otherwise more study is required to decide which is better, or if they are actually indistinguishable. It's the same reason why more trials of an experiment are required to reject the null hypothesis when the effect of the experimental variable is very weak. This is analogous to conside…
> Sometimes after deep thought, you may decide one of them is actually better, but not by very much.
I feel like the value here is simply not for the decision at hand. It's that you learn something for future decisions.
When the options are very close, there's not much value to be gained for this decision, but it indicates there is something new to learn. When the options are obviously far apart, there's nothing to learn.
I've thought about this on and off in the context of poker. When you're playing 24 tables at the same time you simply can't waste focus in the moment on the close calls unless the pot is big. Instead, analyze the things you think are close calls offline.
As others have said, this isn't really a paradox. But it's interesting if you continue testing it with more and more trivial decisions. I think you probably reach a pleateau at some point, and actually one the decision reaches a certain point in triviality, decision time may actually decrease. The real factor here is humans' difficulty in quantifying the relative importance of things, especially their own opinions.
The irrationality presumes: 1. That the decision-making activity itself is wasteful. 2. That the decision-making time would, if not consumed by decision making, be spent elsewhere in a more productive manner. These are hardly safe assumptions. The discussion itself can be enjoyable. The faster decision making can create less certainty in the decision and encourage regret, or create conflict with others. The time gain…
Yeah, but slower decision making may also create conflict with others. For my career choice, I struggled to decide for a very long time, and switched decision after knowing additional information (salary raise, scholarship), which drived some people mad. I'm not sure which decision is better, considering they are so different and probably are not comparable. I just chose to do a postgraduate degree that seems more in…
To dive into your setting: one challenge is that there are multiple optimisation strategies. Do you want to avoid risk as much as possible? Do you want the largest possible income? The highest job satisfaction? The best career path? Etc.
Note that even if you pick one of these as your sole optimisation factor, the choice is not clear. Eg. an industry position can make more money... or you have not-great luck, a string of mediocre jobs with little career growth and little payout. Or even bad luck and end up in jobs where you're a bad fit, learning nothing of career value to you and burning out repeatedly.
On top of that, any advice from experience would be tainted by survivor bias and its inverse; that is, "i liked the outcome, so do that" / "i hated that outcome, so don't do that".
Lastly, it isn't even clear (not can it ever be determined) that the downsides of choice paralysis are worse than the downsides of making the "lesser" choice. Maybe driving people this mad beats having to live in their couch for 6 months. Or maybe it doesn't.
In the end, your alternatives present a very complex scenario, in which no alternative can be fully explored without committing to it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But the original question remains, how do you know that until you have analyzed it?
For certain types of decisions, one can safely rely on prior experience. I know to a high degree of certainty that most entrees at a moderate to high quality restaurant have roughly the same value, therefore choosing quickly is best because there's little to discover and little to gain from the discovery. Many aesthetic choices or choices of mere preference are like this. Other classes of issues are known in advance…
Big decisions are often like icebergs. Most of the important stuff is hidden below the surface. No matter how much you analyze the tip you still have an essentially 50% chance of getting the decision wrong. It's really hard to make a major decision knowing that you have a 50% chance of getting the decision wrong, but over-analyzing the tip of the iceberg is not going to improve your decision making.
The Sally-Ann problem is used to test "theory of mind" in autists: the subject watches Sally place a ball in box A and leave the room. Ann enters the room and removes the ball, placing it in box B. Sally returns to the room, looking for her ball. Which box will she open first?
Those supposedly without "theory of mind" will answer box B, because that's where the ball is. The correct answer is box A, because that's where Sally thinks the ball is.
For the scientists, the Kit-Kat and the Mars bar are equivalent, so taking a long time to choose between them is irrational. But what matters is not whether they are equivalent, it's whether they are equivalent to the chooser who must stop and consider their preferences before making a choice.
My “anti shampoo aisle” strategy (that drives my wife mad) is to stop at the first item that satisfies my requirements. “You didn’t even look at the back of the menu!!” “Good point. I’ll start reading menus from random locations each time.”
Not sure that will do the trick... Imagine a long list with the only two satisfactory items being right next to each other... You'd almost always end up with the first in the list.
Picking a random direction is slightly more robust, but still fails sandwich scenarios... You need to shuffle the menu entirely somehow...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure, but how do you know a given decision is one of those decisions?
For me it should be intuitive. My test is "Will I accept either outcome if I flip a coin?". Is so, flip the coin. If not, pick the option that prevents me from flipping a coin.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But the original question remains, how do you know that until you have analyzed it?
For certain types of decisions, one can safely rely on prior experience. I know to a high degree of certainty that most entrees at a moderate to high quality restaurant have roughly the same value, therefore choosing quickly is best because there's little to discover and little to gain from the discovery. Many aesthetic choices or choices of mere preference are like this. Other classes of issues are known in advance…
There are a lot of insightful heuristics from decision making that can make big decisions much better/easier/etc.
I don't think people would spend any more time on big decisions if they made faster/fewer decisions with little "value" to gain, if anything I think their habit of making fast decisions would mean they spend less time/worse on the big ones!