ABSTRACT
When we make decisions, we might understand ourselves as collecting all the available reasons, weighing them against each other, and subsequently selecting the best course of action given the reasons we have considered. However, empirical research shows that human decision-making rarely happens this way. First, not all our decision-making happens through conscious reflection, like with a pros and cons list. This is because conscious reflection is costly – it takes a lot of cognitive energy for us to think about the millions of small decisions we make each day. It is only when we take a moment, pause, and bring our decisions to mind that we use conscious decision-making (Kahneman, 2013). So, lots of the time, it is a good thing that we do not have to reason about every single decision we make – it would be too costly to do so. Second, we are subject to a host of biases and heuristics that affect our reasoning and decision-making processes (Gilovich, Griffin, and Kahneman, 2002). We might think that these biases affect us most when we are not consciously reflecting on our reasons; however, some biases affect us even when we are thinking hard.
