Social Psychology Illuminates Decision Making

Karin Olah, 'Little Blue Confabulation'
Fabric, Gouache, Graphite on Paper-
13.0 x 10.0"- 2007
Source: MyArtSpace

Science has an article ("PSYCHOLOGY: The Unseen Mind" by Timothy D. Wilson and Yoav Bar-Anan, 22 August 2008) which begins:

Social psychologists have discovered an adaptive unconscious that allows people to size up the world extremely quickly, make decisions, and set goals--all while their conscious minds are otherwise occupied. The human mind operates largely out of view of its owners, possibly because that's the way it evolved to work initially, and because that's the way it works best, under many circumstances. Without such an efficient, powerful, and fast means of understanding and acting on the world, it would be difficult to survive. We would be stuck pondering every little decision, such as whether to put our left or right foot forward first, as the world sped by. But as a result, we are often strangers to ourselves, unable to observe directly the workings of our own minds.

The article goes on to stress that "people freely give reasons for their preferences, even when it is clear that these reasons are confabulations and not accurate reports." They will even give convincing reasons why they made a decision that was diametrically opposed to their actual decisions, if they can be fooled into defending the counterfactual choice.

If the issue is why you had the hot dog rather than the hamburger, the psychological phenomenon is not important. For important decisions, however, we should be careful to analyze options and not jump to conclusions. Using formal decision making proceedures, or even paper and pencil with pros and cons, fault tree analysis, SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) or something of the like, is probably useful. Most important is to avoid being defensive about initial feelings in order to consider alternatives fairly.

confabulation - (psychiatry) a plausible but imagined memory that fills in gaps in what is remembered

Oliver Sacks described a patient's experience in this way:

Another profoundly amnesic patient I knew some years ago dealt with his abysses of amnesia by fluent confabulations. He was wholly immersed in his quick-fire inventions and had no insight into what was happening; so far as he was concerned, there was nothing the matter. He would confidently identify or misidentify me as a friend of his, a customer in his delicatessen, a kosher butcher, another doctor—as a dozen different people in the course of a few minutes. This sort of confabulation was not one of conscious fabrication. It was, rather, a strategy, a desperate attempt—unconscious and almost automatic—to provide a sort of continuity, a narrative continuity, when memory, and thus experience, was being snatched away every instant.