An Introduction to Critical Thinking and Creativity - always yours

210 MAKING RATIONAL DECISIONS
about how many more hotline operators she should hire. But this way of
framing the issue ignores other relevant ones. Are the customers calling because
the products are of low quality? Are the products too difficult to use?
Could a product website or better documentation remove the need to call
the hotline? When we make a decision, we should approach the problem
from different angles to understand it better.
• Overconfidence: Most people overestimate their ability (see Section 20.4).
This is bad for decision making because it means people think less about
the different aspects of the decision and how things can go wrong.
• No learning: Many people are poor decision makers because they fail to
learn from past mistakes. Learning from experience is important, and this
includes understanding our strengths and weaknesses. We have broken
down the decision process into six steps. Think about how much time you
spend on each step and whether you are particularly good or bad with any
of these steps. Also, think of at least one good decision and one bad decision
you have made and try to explain what you have done right or wrong.
See whether these are recurrent themes in your decision making and take
concrete steps to improve your decision making process.
• Sour grapes mentality: This is a matter of changing one's values and objectives
solely to make oneself feel better about the outcome of a bad decision.
Suppose you are trying to decide whether to buy mobile phone model A or
model B. You did not do your research properly and bought model A on
impulse and are now regretting it. So you try to convince yourself that you
actually like A better than B. Of course, there is nothing wrong with changing
your mind, or even changing your mind to make yourself feel better.
What is wrong is to let rationalization becomes a habit, to the extent that we
do not learn from our mistakes and fail to improve our thinking.
• Obsession with sunk costs — Sunk costs refer to time, money or other resources
that have been spent on a project and that cannot be recovered regardless
of one's decisions. Economics suggests that they should be ignored
in future rational decisions. Yet people often think: "I cannot give up now
because I have committed so much already". This is even when giving up
is likely to bring more benefits. For example, a person might cling on to
an unfulfilling relationship, although it would be better for him to put an
end to it right away. Or someone might have put a lot of money into a failing
investment, and continues to do so even when abandoning it would be
more rational economically. There are many reasons why we overemphasize
sunk costs—sentimentality, wishful thinking, fear of failure, and so on.
But the problem is that we end up foregoing better opportunities.