Enxhi Caushi Essays - Philosophy, Epistemology, Psychology, Belief

Enxhi Caushi SES360a Homework#8 Decision making process The topic for this homework was the decision making process, how it works, what affects our decisions and the reason we make them wrong so often. When trying to make a good decision, a person must weigh the positives and negatives of each option, and consider all the alternatives, unfortunately that's not how it usually happens. Even though we like to think that we are smart and we mak e conscious decisions, in the first video we understand that that the reason for us taking the wrong decisions is because we have two different decision m aking systems, intuitive and rational decisions. Most of the times we use the first system, the intuitive, which is faster and involves less thinking and more rarely we use the second system which is more logical, all of this due to laziness of our mind and this is the reason for the wrong decisions we often make. Most of the decisions in our life are made without even realizing that we are making one, we make them by intuition. In the New York Times article about Richard Thaler we understand that we actually underestimate people, assuming that they are rational, but as well as professor Kahnemen he says that most of decisions are made by intuition, for this re ason the economic behavior in people is not easy to be predicted. The work done by Richard Thaler not only persuaded many economists to pay more attention to human behavior, a nd many governments to pay more attention to economics , but also won him a Nobel prize. The third reading the author argues that people aren't good in decision making and that they can be influenced by anything, by mood, any life experience, even the weather outside. He says that in order to stop making unnecessary mistakes and wrong decisions we should start using strict algorithms. In conclusion I would like to say that both articles and the video impressed me, because I didn't know any of those things, I didn't know we were so irrational, easily influenced and especially that most of decisions that we make are intuitive and affected by the external factors. I will try to be more careful in my decisions from now on and give myself more time, making my decision slower and in more methodical and mathematical way.