I was discussing with a friend on how we generally make decisions and how our impressions about someone or something influences those decisions. We then dwelled on the issue of intuition and its role in the decisions we make. Here are my thoughts regarding these high complex topics.
Given a choice one can either base their decisions on information such as knowledge, facts, hunches, advice etc. or, incase of the fools and the brave-hearted, can just pick a totally random choice. Basically, if we take a scale of information taken by people to make any decision the scale starts from zero and tends towards hundred percent. All decisions thus are based on some level of information and rest is faith that they will be able to deal with the outcome of that decision.
As far as I can say from my personal experience, most of the decisions are based on half knowledge and I am willing to bet that the quantum of all decisions made personally over time or the entire population on any point of time, on this scale of information available, will make a normal curve. Let us now focus on whatever knowledge we do rely on, leaving the random faith for later.
With a certain level of confidence, I can speculate that most humans base the future outcome of a decision on the results of their past decisions or knowledge of other past decisions. Taking primary information about anyone or thing or event at any point in time as a point on the time scale and the past outcomes primary and secondary information as other points on the same scale, we tend to find a pattern, which when aware we term as experience and when not we call hunch. This pattern when extrapolated may give us points that we consider to be intuitions, when successful on hindsight and gladly forget in case of a miss.
A case in point is the first impressions that we make of anyone we meet. The quantum of information that goes to make the impression contains more body language than the spoken ones from the person, but that’s just a few points in the graph. The decision that we term as impression is primarily based of our beliefs on the perceived information which have overtime made a pattern on our minds. So if the current perception lies on a trend line we make an impression on the person. Of course, this is difficult to do with just one data point about, so we hold our decision on the person till the time we have gathered enough data points to satisfy ourselves that they fall on a certain trend. Since, we are generally in a hurry to make the impression decision, we subliminally rush into the decision and then try finding data points that confirms to our beliefs and reject those that may be seen as outliers to the pattern. This of course leads to wrong decisions/impressions that the counter party has to work very hard to deviate from.
Taking this information and pattern recognition as the basis for the knowledge based decisions; we can now look at the faith aspect, before dissecting the information part further (Let me keep that for next post). It is my belief that the randomness and faith is closely linked to the risk taking ability of the individual. How much are we ready to risk our decision’s outcome on the available information is what gives the drive to actually go ahead and make the decision. Each individual’s risk taking ability to varies from time to time and on per event basis, however they too follow a certain normalized curve, which indicates a certain consistency of behavior.
View too much arbitary thoughts...Rest for later...
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