Conscious Decision Making

We’re constantly making decisions — decisions about what to eat, which side of the street to walk on, what relationships to be in, whether to stay at our job or quit.  In short, as long as we’re behaving (which is always), we’re making decisions about what behavior to carry out.

Much of the time, we just act “automatically”, without really thinking about our decisions.  This is often a good thing, since if we thought about every single decision, we’d soon spend so much time thinking that we’d never get anything done.  Imagine, for example, if you had to give serious thought to which shoe to tie first or whether to take a bite of your french fries or your hamburger next.  In short, we couldn’t function if we had to give thought to every decision.

Conscious and unconscious

To digress for a moment (to give some background), I think it’s helpful to make a distinction between “conscious” and “unconscious” aspects of the brain.  By this I simply mean that there’s a lot going on in your brain, and that much of what happens, happens outside of our awareness, i.e. unconsciously.  For example, when you hear a sound, you can “just tell” where it comes from (as in “it’s coming from over there!”).  In fact (and horrifyingly for some!), behind the scenes your brain is doing a lot of complex math to compare the sounds from your two ears to figure out where the source of the sound is.  The mathematical analysis of the sounds is happening unconsciously, while the sense of “where the sound is coming from”, the result of that analysis, is present in consciousness.

To get back to decision making, I think that much of our decision making happens unconsciously, meaning that our brain just handles making the decision, without the decision being consciously thought about.  Conscious decision making, on the other hand, happens when we consciously think about a decision, and come to a conclusion about what the best course of action would be.  We sometimes engage in conscious decision making for important decisions (“should I accept Job Offer A or Job Offer B?”) or when making a group decision (the dreaded business meeting or deciding where to eat with friends).

Conscious decision making influences, but doesn’t control, our actions

I should add an important caveat here.  By conscious decision making I mean (as just described) that we consciously think about several courses of action and come to a conclusion about which one we think is best.  However, we’ve probably all had the experience of thinking about the best thing to do, making a decision… and then doing something completely different.  For example, if you’re single you might have the experience of seeing someone you’re attracted to, debating whether to approach them, consciously deciding that you should in fact go talk to them… and then walking away out of fear of rejection.  So it seems that making a “conscious decision” (thinking about the best course of action) may influence what we actually do, but doesn’t directly control what we actually do.

While making decisions without thinking is certainly good in some cases (which shoe to tie first), I suspect that in other cases we might benefit from more conscious decision making.  For example, we’ve probably all had days where we’ve “wasted time” doing something unimportant, later wishing we had done something else, and yet at no point did we consciously decide to spend our time as we did.