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The full talk is in the Feifan series on Fanshu, a Chinese audiobook app; this page is only a summary.
What This Episode Is About
Psychology research suggests that the average adult makes around 70 conscious decisions a day. Big ones like picking a career or deciding where to settle down, small ones like what to eat or when to head out—the path of your life is built out of decisions, large and small. You could say the quality of your decisions sets the quality of your life.
But the human brain was never built to be a perfectly rational, calculating “decision machine.” We keep getting stuck in decision “loops”: contradicting ourselves, wanting to have our cake and eat it too, being wise only after the fact, refusing to admit we were wrong long after it’s obvious, or walking straight into trouble we saw coming a mile away.
This book walks through the decision “loops” we fall into in everyday life and lays out the psychology and neuroscience behind them, so you can spot and sidestep your brain’s blind spots and make sharper calls.
You Will Hear
- The 3 big limits your brain runs into when it makes decisions
- How to spot 7 common patterns of faulty decision-making
- 12 thinking tools for making better decisions
Quotes from This Episode
Reason takes a lot of effort; feeling takes none at all.
Coincidences aren’t actually rare. It’s because they run against our intuition that we tend to read deeper meaning into them.
We turn into “Monday-morning quarterbacks” because we tend to confirm what actually happened instead of asking how else it might have gone.
More knowledge doesn’t always add up to better judgment.
About the Author
Scott Plous Teaches and does research at Wesleyan University. His work on The Psychology of Judgment and Decision Making earned him the American Psychological Association’s William James Book Award.
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