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Making Decisions That Matter: how people face important life choices

Kathleen M. Galotti

2002 Lawrence Erlbaum Associates: Mahwah, 
pp. 177 ISBN 0-8058-3397-8 (pb)  £16.95

Practical Philosophy  (Book Reviews) Autumn 2002 Volume 4.2

Reviewed by: David Arnaud 

Galotti is one of what seems to be rather a rare breed: a cognitive psychologist who questions whether the findings from well-controlled psychology laboratories apply to real life. This is an important issue to raise as research into decision-making over the last sixty-odd years has been almost exclusively dominated by laboratory studies. Whether we are justified in generalising from a laboratory to real life is basically a question about analogical reasoning – we need to ask to what extent relevant features of the real world are like relevant features of the laboratory. Galotti suggests that the analogy might break down in three ways. First, in laboratory studies the information used is given to the decision maker while in real life decision-making we need to seek out and sift through information. Second, we care about our real-life decisions but not the academic type problems presented in laboratory studies. Third, laboratory studies have been set up so that there is a single correct outcome while many important decisions have no perfect outcome, but possibilities that vary in overall goodness. 

Galotti has a range of goals for the book, both academic and practical. The academic goals are describing research into real-life decision making, comparing this with theoretical predictions from laboratory-based research, and pointing out questions that await further research. The practical goal is helping readers in their own decision-making (the back cover bills it as being useful in applied settings such as health care centres, and schools). All these goals are worthy but I found them somewhat in conflict. The reader looking for practical advice needs to work persistently to uncover it as the book hesitates between being a descriptive account of what psychologists have found people happen to do when making decisions, and a normative account of what people should do. 

As Galotti herself acknowledges, comparing real world experience with laboratory-based research is a difficult task to fulfil as there is a paucity of real-life research (a lack that she herself has been striving to fill) making this book a tentative ‘map of new territory’ (p. x). As a very rough ‘guestimate’ (which, incidentally, laboratory research suggests you should be very wary of trusting), at least 90% of the studies quoted are laboratory based. This means that often, after introducing laboratory research and pointing to how the analogy between the research and real-life breaks down, she is simply left asking to what extent the laboratory finding would apply to real life. On other occasions there are clear parallels drawn between the laboratory and real life. For example, laboratory researchers have found that participants often pursue sunk costs by irrationally taking past expenditure into account in their future spending. Data collected from 132 California banks over a nine-year period found that the banks were more likely to write off bad loans when senior management at the bank had just changed. New managers, not having made the initial commitment, were less likely to fall for the sunk costs fallacy. Occasionally she seems to forget to ask how good the analogies are when, for instance, she uses Kohlberg’s moral dilemmas to analyse moral decision-making. The vignette-based tasks this research was based on seem, to me anyway, not to be particularly close analogies to real life on Galotti’s own criteria. 

Perplexing questions arise in relating the laboratory to real world research. Is the role of the laboratory to simply provide a source of possible hypotheses – these are things we find in the laboratory, see if you can find them in the real world? If you then find a potential analogue in the real world, can you be sure that the same mechanism accounts for what happens, now that there is less control over confounding variables? If you can, why do you need the laboratory study at all? If you cannot, how does the laboratory study help? Also, if we find some causal mechanism in the laboratory, are we more justified in our analysis of the real world or, conversely, if we find it in the real world, are we more justified in thinking the laboratory is relevantly like the real world?

 What is it that real-life decision makers find difficult? Galotti’s own research, looking at students trying to choose colleges and courses, suggests that they find themselves confronted by staggering quantities of information, and limited time for processing it. They want to make wise choices but they are not sure what information to collect, and how to assess and order it. Galotti quotes the heartfelt complaint of one respondent thus: ‘The process of decision making has been, well, unpleasant to say the least. First…there are 6 billion or so colleges out there… At least 3 thousand [brochures] arrive a day…most of what they say has nothing to do with anything important…and even after sifting through this plethora of propaganda, I feel like I have accomplished nothing.’ (p. 44) Galotti’s conclusion is that ‘students simply don’t know what it means to be rational when it comes to making real life decisions while living their lives in the real world. I argue in this book that there are ways of being rational that don’t lead to endless deliberation or require the decision maker to spend a month sequestered in a log cabin without phones or electricity’ (p. 3). 

Decision Map (slightly modified)

Options   bbbbbb

So what does Galotti recommend? Making a decision should consist of setting goals, gathering information, structuring the decision and making a final choice. For setting goals, she has little advice to offer beyond noting that we often are not good at getting clear on what we want as we rely upon habit, or choose what is immediate over what is important . How we can get clear on our goals is not explored. Galotti is at her strongest in offering advice about how to gather and structure information. She points to the dangers of pursuing irrelevant information, and how various heuristics and biases can lead us to falsely assess the information we do find. To record information and structure the decision, she recommends both Benjamin Franklin’s Moral Algebra and constructing a decision map. To use the Moral Algebra method, record the pros and cons of an option in separate columns over a series of days and then cross out arguments on both sides that weigh equally to see where the resulting weight lies. This, Galotti claims, stops ideas getting forgotten, reduces load on working memory, allows time for reflection, reduces the influence of our current mood and immediate situation, organises the ideas, and provides a method to weigh, rather than simply count, arguments. The decision map (see the table above) provides more flexibility as it is possible to assess multiple options against multiple goals, although its limitations are that it gives no indication of the probability that the option will satisfy the goal, and no guarantee against our overlooking options or goals, or wrongly weighing how important these goals are to us.

 Besides this the book takes the more academically minded reader through a useful introduction to some of the current descriptive theories of decision-making such as Image Theory and Recognition Based Decision Making, and many of the suggestions that have been offered for different ways to assess multiple options such as satisficing (choose the first option you find that passes an acceptability threshold), elimination by aspects (progressively remove options that fail to pass a series of acceptability tests) and MAUT (compare all options against all criteria).

As someone interested in the practical question I would have liked more of a normative analysis than was provided here – what, if anything, can these theories offer on how we should make decisions? A current hot topic is the idea of adaptive decision-making – the rather sensible suggestion that given the time and energy costs involved in decision making we should (and often do) adopt different strategies depending upon the kind and importance of the decision we are facing. Galotti’s take on this is to look at the different areas of consumer, legal, medical and moral decision-making, as well as contrasting individual and group decision-making. This is good if you want a summary overview of research carried out in these areas but fails again to address the normative question of how we should make these kinds of decisions.

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