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Jul 28, 2011

"Indecision may or may not be my problem." --Jimmy Buffett

Why Are Easy Decisions So Hard?

"Why do I squander so much mental energy on the mundane purchases of everyday life? I think I've found a good answer. Although I know that every floss will work well enough, sometimes I still can't help waste an embarrassing amount of time on the decision. What I believe happens is that instead of realizing that picking a floss is an easy decision, I confuse the array of options and excess of information with importance, which then leads my brain to conclude that this decision is worth lots of time and attention. Call it the drug store heuristic: A cluttered store shelf leads us to automatically assume that a choice must really matter, even if it doesn't." Jonah Lehrer, the author of "How We Decide" further describes some clever experiments that expose the cognitive illusion of seemingly important choices.