Scott DeMarchi and James T. Hamilton have a new book out and the subtitle is The Habits of Mind That Really Determine How We Make Decisions. I take this to be the key paragraph:
It's called fast food, but your decision-making process in ordering a chicken sandwich can be incredibly complex. In the following section, we describe six core habits of mind that affect how you make decisions in all areas of your life. We call these TRAITS: Time, Risk, Altruism, Information, meToo, and Stickiness.
Here is a review and explication of the book.
I haven’t read the book yet, but this taps into what I think is a very American attitude that has both good and bad aspects. The idea that you can and must choose your own path in life is a profoundly good and important idea. However, it also feeds into a strange consumer mentality. Instead of being what you choose, you could be, for example, what you produce. Joseph Tobin’s work (Preschool in Three Countries, and a follow-up that just came out) shows how US preschools focus on helping children make choices from a very early age (something that Japanese and Chinese preschools do not). Watching his videos you get an image of kids being socialized to be shoppers. Given that that’s probably not going to be our role in the global economy going forward, I wonder how adaptive that is.
The survey is really bad. For example, I came out “risk neutral” which would make anyone that knows me laugh. I came out this way because 3 out 5 questions are about driving–I only learned to drive late in life and do not do it often, and it says almost nothing about my risk-taking outside of cars. Also, another question is about whether I like to gamble–only someone with very little understanding of probability would think that “liking to gamble” is a reasonable way of expressing one’s risk-taking. How about investing? How about taking career risks? How about taking risks for love or for adventure? Very poorly designed survey. Certainly makes me question the wisdom of the author.
Oh, I dunno, giving people the illusion of self-perception and enticing them with the ability to understand their friends and customers after less than 5 minutes’ work sounds pretty savvy.
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