Perception and decision making

This is going to be a fairly crude assessment of things (at least academically)...

Rational decision making consists mainly of a few things
1) Perceived risk
2) Perceived benefit
3) Assessed likelihood of various outcomes

Of course there is a LOT more involved than that, but those are the basics. Which is the problem with rational decision making. There's emotion (i.e. fear) that could skew, either positively or negatively, one's view of decision at hand. And yes, there are times when emotion actually leads us to make better decisions than cognition alone, but I'm not getting into that here. There are general biases that most everyone face, my favorite being regret theory. Regret theory is the idea that the regret one might feel by making a decision that results in a negative outcome can have a very strong impact on that decision.

So, it is actually impossible (I think) to assess every aspect of a decision. It's kinda like the idea of traveling back in time and changing something that might set off a chain reaction that changes history; see this Simpsons clip for further info. It's hard to take into account the affect one small decision might have on other aspects of your life that you might never have thought of. In high school when I found myself daydreaming I would catch myself, note whatever it was I was thinking about, and try to trace it back to whatever triggered that thought - just for the fun of it. For example, let's say I found myself imagining various ice cream flavors Ben and Jerry's should try, which was a result of me thinking about weird food combinations, which was a result of me thinking about a sign I saw at 7-11 for slurpee flavor combos, which was a result of me thinking about how I lost my 7-11 receipt, which was a result of the teacher talking about the importance of keeping receipts for tax purposes. From the topic of taxes to Ben and Jerry's...well I don't know where I was going with this. Perhaps I'm trying to say everything is/can be related to everything else. Which is why I believe that it is impossible to assess every aspect of a decision before making it.

Basically, we can't tell the future and what the results of a decision will be. So we have to make decisions based on how likely we perceive various outcomes to be. I'd like to note that i said "perceived" likelihood. Naturally, humans are extremely biased creatures. So, for example some people think that using significant lottery numbers, like birthdays or anniversaries, make them luckier. If you're reading this you no doubt understand that that's not true. However, those people *perceive* their potential outcome to be of greater likelihood, and there's little you could do to convince them otherwise.

Why am I talking about this? To remind myself to be rational and that my perception of the state of things differs greatly from others.