Choice

Choice refers to the set of different options available to a being. Motivators and models can influence how a choice is reached. People generally value having freedom to choose, but when options are severely limited or artificially constrained, it can cause discomfort and lead to unsatisfactory results. On the other hand, having too many options can create confusion, lower satisfaction, spark regret over paths not taken, and foster indifference in an unstructured life. Believing that selecting an object or course of action automatically grants control over it can also cause psychological issues.

Decisions can be grouped into four or five main types, though they may be described differently. Brian Tracy identifies command decisions, which only a leader or owner can make; delegated decisions, which anyone can handle, such as choosing an inconsequential detail like a bike shed’s color; avoided decisions, where the stakes are so high that a wrong choice could have irreversible consequences like death; and no-brainer decisions, where only one reasonable option exists. A fifth type, sometimes combined with avoided and no-brainer decisions, is the collaborative decision, made through consultation and agreement with others. This approach improved air-traffic safety by allowing lesser crew members to raise concerns rather than deferring solely to the captain.

Another way to classify decisions is by the thought process involved: rational, intuitive, recognition-based, or a combination. Since “type” is an imprecise term, choices can also be sorted by outcome and who is affected—for example, business, personal, or consumer choices. Politicians may decide based on local, national, or international effects. As a moral principle, decisions should be made by those most affected, though this is not applied to prisoners, who would likely choose not to remain jailed. Robert Gates cited this principle when allowing photographs of returning war dead. Choices can be conscious or unconscious. Processes like brainwashing can make unconscious choices appear to be conscious ones. Choices may also be irreversible or reversible; making irreversible, existential choices can help reduce the overload of too many options.

In economics, evaluability affects how people judge options. When choosing, people assess the quality of each option’s attributes. For instance, in hiring, attributes like work experience, GPA, and letters of recommendation are judged. Some attributes are highly evaluable, like SAT scores, because their distribution is well known—a score below 800 is bad, above 1500 is excellent. Others are poorly evaluable, such as hours spent on homework, since employers lack a clear distribution for that attribute. This can cause preference reversals between joint and separate evaluations. In a 1999 study, subjects considered two programming job candidates: Candidate J (70 KY programs, GPA 2.5) and Candidate S (10 KY programs, GPA 3.9). When both were compared jointly, subjects offered similar salaries, treating low GPA with high experience as equal to high GPA with low experience. But when only one candidate was evaluated separately, subjects paid Candidate S (high GPA) significantly more, because KY programs are hard to evaluate in isolation.

Research in economic psychology has examined how people behave with small versus large choice sets. The effect of choice set size on purchase likelihood remains unclear; in some cases, large sets discourage individuals from buying.