How Do You Make Decisions?
The thing you do before you commit
Some people build a spreadsheet, some people ask three friends, some people wait until the decision makes itself. Researchers have measured these habits for thirty years, and each one has a situation where it wins and a situation where it costs you badly.
Before you start There are no right answers. Pick what is usually true for you, not what sounds best.
Think about decisions with real consequences - a job, a move, a big purchase - not about what you have for lunch.
What it measures
Five habitual approaches to deciding: analysing the options, trusting a gut reading, asking other people, deciding fast, and putting it off.
Based on: General Decision-Making Style inventory (Scott & Bruce, 1995)
Possible results
The Analyst
You want the reasoning to hold up
The Reader
You know before you can explain why
The Consulter
You think out loud, with other people
The Mover
Decide now, adjust later
The Postponer
Deciding is the part that costs you
Common questions
Should I trust my gut or not?
It depends on one thing: whether you have had enough practice in that specific area with quick, clear feedback. Kahneman and Klein, who disagreed about almost everything else, agreed on this. A nurse's intuition about a deteriorating patient is reliable; the same person's intuition about the stock market is not.
Can I have more than one style?
Yes, and the healthiest pattern is several. In the original research the five are separate scales, not exclusive categories - people can score high on rational and intuitive at once. Your result here is your loudest habit, not your only one.
Why is avoidant treated as the bad one?
Because the evidence is fairly one-sided: across studies it is the style associated with lower satisfaction, more regret and worse outcomes. That is a statement about a habit, not about a person - and it is the style that improves most reliably with a single change, which is imposing external deadlines.
Sources
- Scott, S. G., & Bruce, R. A. (1995). Decision-making style: The development and assessment of a new measure. Educational and Psychological Measurement.
- Schwartz, B., Ward, A., Monterosso, J., Lyubomirsky, S., White, K., & Lehman, D. R. (2002). Maximizing versus satisficing: Happiness is a matter of choice. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
- Kahneman, D., & Klein, G. (2009). Conditions for intuitive expertise: A failure to disagree. American Psychologist.
An honest note The five styles come from a genuine inventory that has been validated across several samples, and this is a short adaptation of it rather than the inventory itself. The main limit is built into the method: it asks how you believe you decide, and people are famously unreliable narrators of their own reasoning - a good deal of research shows we construct an explanation after the fact and experience it as the reason. So read this as your account of yourself, which is worth something but is not a recording. One result deserves a specific caveat. Whether trusting your gut is wise is genuinely contested, and the most useful conclusion came from two researchers on opposite sides who worked out together when each was right: intuition earns its keep in areas where the situation is regular enough to learn from and where feedback arrives quickly and clearly. In areas without those two conditions, confident intuition is still produced and is much less reliable - so the value of that style depends on the domain and not on the person.
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