Making decisions and choices are something we must do every day. Decisions have consequences. How they are made, and what they are based on, can determine if they end up being good or bad decisions. What we decide will follow how we size-up, understand, or judge a situation. Hopefully, that judgment is based on gathering enough information, reviewing that information, checking each option and its value, coming to a conclusion, and finally making the decision. Hopefully we have also tried to anticipate or predict the outcome of acting on that decision.

A correct decision depends on anticipating or predicting what will happen if different choices are made, and what each choice is based on. Taking too much information about one option, and too little from others, is an error. All possible outcomes require attention, or inconsistent judgments may be the result. When getting information from other people, they may know a lot about one thing but not much about other options. They may have strong opinions or biases, but not actually know much. If you want to know how much a person knows, ask objective questions about facts. It won’t take long to figure out if you are getting good information or advice based on knowledge or hot air.

There are people who are very confident about their limited knowledge. If you are swayed by their overconfidence and undeserved enthusiastic suggestions, you may end up disappointed by the results of your decision. A possible better resource may be the advice or judgment from a group of people. Psychologists have learned that better advice can come from a group of people in which each person in the group knows something about the situation. That is called the wisdom of the crowd, but there is no guarantee that any of them know more about the situation than the person who has to make the decision.

Ultimately you are still on your own. You need to assess and evaluate the evidence you are gathering, and update the information that you are referencing. How often has a choice been useful in the past? If not, what makes you think that it will work now? The more that something has worked in the past, the better the odds that it may be useful in the present. If it has not been helpful in the past, the odds are that it may not be useful now. No matter how many options you look at or may be suggested to you, a rational approach to making decisions will involve comparing the possible outcome of each. It doesn’t matter which option you may like or prefer. What does matter is which option offers the best possible outcome. The one with the best outcome may take extra work, but may be worth investing the time and effort.

Understanding how decisions are made must also involve taking a look at the person making the decision. Is the person making the decision willing to take risks? Risk-taking is a personality factor that will influence choice. A person may be comfortable taking chances in one type of situation but not in others. Another factor is how much knowledge and actual understanding does he or she have about the situation and/or the various options

Another angle in decision-making research has to do with the age or time of life of the person making a decision. For adolescents researchers tend to look at how they develop the skills to make decisions. While other research looks at how you lose those skills in our older years. An important factor as we age is decline in what is called working memory. Working memory is a person’s ability to hold information in memory just long enough to use that information to solve

or do something. It tends to last for anywhere between about 30 seconds and a little more than maybe three minutes. The decrease in working memory can lead to more difficult decision-making. Applying decision-making skills may decline as we age.

How do you counter this decline? Make sure that your decisions are well-informed. Be aware of your biases.Try to make decisions that are based on facts, not your biases and preferences. Use the feedback you get from the results of past decisions and other people’s reactions to those decisions. Be humble. Overconfidence will blind you and put you on the wrong path. Learning from other people’s mistakes in similar situations is also good information to have. You do not have to make or repeat the same errors in making decisions and choices to figure out what to do or not do.