Human Decision Making
Lets take a typical domestic situation that occurs daily, so innocuous you never gave it further thought to it, to illustrate my point.
You see, my family drinks alot of Yakult, so our fridge is always stocked.
Now I go to the fridge, ready to ransack its treasures, and Im faced with the choice. To Yakult, or not to Yakult. Some days I say ok, because its a healthy drink that aids digestion. Some days I reject it, because it obviously is too high on sugar content.
On a daily basis, we soothe our tortured minds with justification of said choice. On a case by case basis, it makes logical rational sense. In the long run, assuming the result of choosing to drink is 70% (for me), it means Ive not made a choice. (clearly its too sweet, cai!)
Point is, human decision-making process is fine for selection of such trivial things. But scale it up, and the repercussions are more severe.
Think about it, how many times in your life, have you gone to a sinful treat in the kitchen, and succumbed. Likewise, kept the willpower and refrained? Both times having pleased with your moral justification of lets-not-waste-food vs i-wanna-be-healthy.
human are odd, no?
Yakult time.
You see, my family drinks alot of Yakult, so our fridge is always stocked.
Now I go to the fridge, ready to ransack its treasures, and Im faced with the choice. To Yakult, or not to Yakult. Some days I say ok, because its a healthy drink that aids digestion. Some days I reject it, because it obviously is too high on sugar content.
On a daily basis, we soothe our tortured minds with justification of said choice. On a case by case basis, it makes logical rational sense. In the long run, assuming the result of choosing to drink is 70% (for me), it means Ive not made a choice. (clearly its too sweet, cai!)
Point is, human decision-making process is fine for selection of such trivial things. But scale it up, and the repercussions are more severe.
Think about it, how many times in your life, have you gone to a sinful treat in the kitchen, and succumbed. Likewise, kept the willpower and refrained? Both times having pleased with your moral justification of lets-not-waste-food vs i-wanna-be-healthy.
human are odd, no?
Yakult time.
posted by cai at 8:37 AM
2 Comments:
heh, in econ, we call this time inconsistency of preferences, even if your today self is fully committed to a plan of action, your tomorrow self has different ideas in mind.
so what some people do instead is to create an external commitment device, since we can't trust ourselves. take going to the gym (i hate doing that btw) but i'll call a friend up to arrange a date to go to the gym. and its harder to back out since not going leads to some form of immediate "punishment": your friend whining on the phone, saying "wah lau! you dua me ah!!!"
unfortunately we cant apply this to all instances.
my mind just attempted to say
"wah lau, i dua me!!"
:)
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