Decision

Recently, Dr Luke Houghton put up some posts on decision-making and biases. For one reason or another, it has taken me some time to get round to reflecting on these. Let's begin, as Dr Houghton does, by asking What are decisions.

First of all, I distinguish between the active process of making a decision and the results of the process. So really, I'm talking about "deciding". Secondly, the process of deciding is one that I consider as a pure thinking process. That is, as interesting a topic as "collective decision making" may be, I view that as a social context for individual decisions; broadly, collective "decisions" are agreements about the relative importance of individual decisions. The result of these circumscriptions is that deciding is viewed as a subset of thinking.

Technically, this allows for the possibility that deciding and thinking are one and the same, so we need to be clearer about what sort of thinking can be classed as deciding. There is, in fact, a simple characteristic of all decisions that we can propose as a defining characteristic: the reduction in the number of potential or contemplated outcomes. To break this down further, decisions are forward-looking (to be contrasted with memory, for example) and "selective" (to be contrasted with "productive" or "creative" operations, such as imagination). To be clear, though, when we make decisions we may, and often should, do so in the context of a wider process which includes productive operations (increasing the options being considered); but these productive operations are not part of the actual process of deciding. (It is also possible to make decisions about the past, but these are still "forward-looking" since they are in fact decisions about how the past will be viewed from that point onwards.)

Now Dr Houghton claims that we make decisions to solve problems, so he may be working with a much tighter definition of decision. In my view, deciding is a core sub-process of thinking. It almost seems inappropriate to classify a process as "thinking" if there is no "deciding" involved. The eye cannot see without sense-making "decisions" about what is being perceived, for example. And a purely productive process such as brainstorming has no utility without a subsequent process involving decisions about what is valuable. So, in my view, "decision" is best viewed as an essential component of intelligence. And it is for this reason that the thinking person comes with an in-built faculty for deciding. Or, to put it less emotively, thinking demands some limiting mechanism(s) to prevent an infinitude of alternative interpretations or potential outcomes. "Decision" is the term used for most limiting mechanisms. Some limiting mechanisms that I would not class as "decisions" are random and programmatic: essentially, where the reasons behind the limitation have no reference to the substance of what is selected for or against.

So..."decision" is a thinking process that limits the substance of thought by reference to that substance. I have been careful here to avoid the conclusion that "decision" is conscious or considered, not least because we have yet to explore these ideas. It seems to me that the various "flaws" in making decisions are generally the unfortunate result of more generally useful processes, just as optical illusions are produced by the operation of generally useful visual and perceptive processes. But the proper time to consider these "biases" (as Dr Houghton terms them) is after we have developed a coherent picture of "decisive processes", which will be the topic of a later post.