Top 5 Facts About Why You Make Terrible Decisions

How could you have been so foolish?! Welcome to WatchMojo’s Top 5 Facts. In this instalment, we’re going to have to give you some bad news and countdown the five biggest reasons that you make awful choices. Don’t feel too bad though because we’re all guilty.

You probably feel pretty good about your last big purchase, but should you? Studies have shown that once we make a choice between two options, we begin to remember, and even add, positive qualities to our choices whether or not they’re actually true. This is often called a choice-supporting bias. Subjects of one experiment hypothetically bought one of two classic cars. Just one week later, when given a list of potential features of the car they bought, they had trouble identifying which ones were from their car, the other, or even a much newer vehicle.This increased sense of satisfaction affects our ability to judge the effectiveness of our decisions, creates false memories, and can influence future decisions. The good news is that knowing about this bias is half of the fight to stop it. By carefully re-evaluating decisions after we make them and putting aside our egos, we can stop defending our bad choices.

This is known as the Clustering Illusion. You see this a lot in the worlds of gambling and sports. Roulette players may feel that after a long string of one color that the other color is “due”. Basketball players are often said to be on a “hot streak,” but studies have shown that they don’t really exist. Our brains so desperately want to find patterns among random events that we take a small subset of instances and convince ourselves that it’s a pattern. While this may seem harmless, it can be a matter of life or death. During WWII, Londoners developed theories about the German rockets hitting their city in order to find safer spots to hide, though research shows the rockets were randomly dispersed. Whether you’re playing the slots or running for your life, it’s important to remember that each attempt is independent from others.

Have you ever avoided checking your bank balance at the end of the month or ignored signs your car might need a major repair? Research has shown that when the investment market is bad that people check their portfolios 50-80% less frequently, but why? Humans are inherently “loss averse” meaning that we feel the pain of loss more deeply than the joy of gaining something. If we know that there may be a problem or are presented with troubling information, our tendency is to ignore it and pretend that it never happened. Experts refer to this as the Ostrich Effect, but you might just call it “denial”. This mistake in decision-making is especially worrisome because it causes small, easily-solved problems to grow into much bigger, harder-to-solve issues. Next time, just fix your damn car.

Sure, maybe other people make these mistakes, but not you, right? Wrong! Researchers from Carnegie Mellon University found that nearly everyone is able to see the flaws in others’ logic but not their own. An astounding 85% of people believed they were less biased than the average person. Even though you might be yelling at the young babysitter in the slasher flick not to go upstairs, turns out, you’d probably go up there, too. This is called the Blind Spot Bias. The news gets worse. Even after learning about this bias, subjects still rated themselves as less biased than others. Maybe you should take someone else’s advice once in awhile.

This is the dreaded Confirmation Bias. Decades of research has shown that we humans are notorious for only seeking, interpreting, and remembering information that supports our own ideas. We ignore contradictory information, and even ambiguous data is spun to somehow back up what we already think we know. This is especially true for emotionally-charged, deeply held beliefs. This realization has had a profound effect on science. Rather than conducting experiments to prove their theories, scientists must do their absolute best to disprove what they believe. Double-blind studies which hide from the researcher what exactly they’re testing have become standard just to keep them from subconsciously affecting the outcome of the test to support their hypothesis. Even when confronted with clear information that doesn’t agree with what we believe, we’re incredibly slow to change our minds.

Does our list have you feeling like you need to go bury your head in the sand? Or are you stunned by just how wrong everyone else is? For more completely logical top 10s and deeply flawed top 5s, be sure to subscribe to WatchMojo.com.