Jan 26, 20206 min read

Why are certain choices harder than others?

forking forest path as in the road not taken — Photo by Jens Lelie on Unsplash.

When we see rainclouds looming, we carry an umbrella with us, when our GPS doesn’t work, we ask people for directions, and when we walk through snow, we always wear winter boots. These are all choices that we make throughout our lives, and more often than not, we don’t regret them. But why are certain choices so hard?

Imagine a scenario where you go to your local supermarket to buy a jar of jam. But when you eventually get there, you see that you have too many options to choose from but don’t exactly know which one to select amongst the many. The chances are that you would pick one at random and get out of there, or else, you are faced by what’s referred to as the paradox of choice. It states that even though you are initially attracted by the number of choices that you have in front of you, counterintuitively, it makes the process of decision-making hard.

This is what Sheena S. Iyengar of Columbia University and Mark R. Lepper of Stanford University researched[1] through a series of studies in 2000. A tasting booth was set up as part of the study in an upscale grocery store. The booth displayed a limited quantity of 6 flavors of jam on one day, and another day, it displayed an excessive amount of 24, and the behavior of customers was observed on both days. While the more-jam-scenario allured more consumers to the booth, the percentage of people who sampled the jam was almost similar in both scenarios. Moreover, the lesser-jam-scenario led to about 30% purchases, whereas only 3% of the consumers bought jam in the extensive-choice-condition. Further studies that were similar in concept were done, and they concluded a possibility that, though more choices would look desirable to people at first, it may sometimes negatively affect their decision-making process.

A supermarket shelf containing an assortment of pickles, jams and sauces — Photo by Daria Volkova on Unsplash

Barry Schwartz[2], a psychologist, explains in his famous book, ‘the paradox of choice’ that although choices are important to our lives, it comes with two faults. One of which is the decision making paralysis, just like the jam experiment stated above, where we feel confounded by the number of choices that are in front of us that we rather remain indecisive. The second fault is commonly known as the buyer’s remorse. This usually succeeds a difficult purchase decision, when you feel you could have chosen a better jam when indeed you had numerous choices to select from.

Choices and the brain

One of the reasons why certain choices could be difficult than others is dependent on the way our brain makes these decisions. Dr. Anne Churchland, a neuroscientist, explains[3] how the decision-making process involves participation from different parts of the brain, spanning much of the cortex and subcortical regions. So, any hindrance or damage to these parts might disrupt the way we make decisions. This could be a plausible reason why people with mental illness undergo varied decision-making processes from others.

The act of choosing is so intricate, no matter how instantaneous some of them might seem. But even after this incredible feat by the brain, why is it that we make wrong choices? Well, one of the reasons could be because of a certain disconnect between the maturity of different parts of the brain. Our brain has different regions that process different sets of information. For instance, the prefrontal cortex plays an integral part in acts like thinking, weighing risks[4] and rewards, planning, and could well call it a rational region as opposed to the limbic system which is involved with processing emotions. But the limbic system develops and matures earlier than the prefrontal cortex in our brains. And this mismatch leads to the limbic system gaining the upper hand in making decisions over the prefrontal cortex, which leads to decisions forged from emotions. This could be the reason why teenagers are more susceptible to making wrong choices than adults, whose prefrontal cortex is fully developed and rationally aware of possible outcomes of a choice. But that’s not to say that adults make the right decisions every single time.

Moreover, the neurons involved in the decision-making process rely on external sensory signals like perception and internal signals like memory or experiences upon deciding. This means that when you decide on something such as buying a jam, your external stimuli, like perception of color, taste, and even the smell of the jam are inputted through the sensory organs, which interact with internal stimuli like your ideas, beliefs, and even your biases, and the concoction of these neural activities leads to the final decision. So, ultimately, a choice is a combination or a flurry of emotional and rational signals which communicates with each other leading to an outcome. But one can only tell if the decision is favorable or not after it has been made!

The miracle on the Hudson—making the right choices

But sometimes choices are forced, they could literally be the difference between life and death. Take the case of surgeons, for them, precise choices are not an option, but a necessity. A tiny fluctuation of the hand might result in a catastrophe. A similar story is of a man who stopped a potential tragedy through a series of calculated decisions.

Pilots waiting to takeoff — Photo by Jon Flobrant on Unsplash

On January 15th, 2009, the US Airways flight[5] 1549, an Airbus A320, took off from LaGuardia airport in New York City. But shortly after takeoff, something unexpected happened. The airplane hit a flock of geese, which rendered both engines powerless. Realizing that he could not reach to a nearby airport, Chesley Burnett (Sully) Sullenberger, did something no commercial pilot had ever done before. He landed the aircraft safely on the Hudson River, saving the lives of 155 people on board. Had Sully made a faulty choice, things could have gone wrong, but he did not. instead, he showed impeccable composure in dire need. He went through the engine restart[6] checklist procedures with his co-pilot, assessed the best place to land, communicated with the flight control, managed his crew and passengers, maneuvered the aircraft through the harbor traffic, lifted the nose of the plane to land tail first on the water. And when the aircraft hydroplaned to a stop, he even helped with the evacuation process, ensuring that there was no one left behind on the plane.

Later, The National Transportation Safety Board ruled that the plane would not have made it back to LaGuardia if tried. Which begs the question? what if it were some other pilot? Would they have done the same things that Sully did? Well, that’s a difficult question to approach. While it's definite that any pilot would have taken measures for the welfare of their passengers and crew under such a situation, the choices if different from what Sully had made, could have ended badly, or perhaps not, there is no way of answering it, and let’s hope that we’ll never have to. But when we look deeper into who Sully is, it might give us a new perspective of making good choices.

How do we make better choices?

While people deem Sully as someone who showed incredible nerve through his extraordinary act of courage, there is more to him than what it would seem like. Sully’s career was an amalgam of many jobs that require technical know-how, decisiveness, and composure. For instance, he was a former fighter pilot, a crash investigator, a licensed glider pilot, an airline safety scientist, a teacher on airline crisis handling, and most importantly, he has been in the field for more than 40 years with over 20,000 hours worth of experience. So, when faced with such an unexpected event, his knowledge in various fields of aviation helped him make the series of imperative decisions, which helped him land the aircraft safely.

The fact is that we are all Sully at heart, we want to make the right choices for ourselves that is in the best interest of others. Sully’s story is heroic, but it opens an interesting discussion about the human brain. It implies how the brain makes the right choices when it gets more knowledge of a task. Our brains are neuroplastic[7], which means that it’s always learning about new things, and the neural patterns are constantly getting reorganized within it, depending on our daily experiences. And when the brain has more information to decide from, it makes choices that reflect its knowledge of the subject at hand. And perhaps that’s how we become more decisive, by understanding the things around us better.

Why are certain choices harder than others?

Choices and the brain

The miracle on the Hudson—making the right choices

How do we make better choices?

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