Title: Must-Read! The 8 Factors that Influence Decision Making
Headings: 8 Things You Don’t Know Are Affecting Our Choices Every Day: The Science of Decision Making
8 Things You Don’t Know Are Affecting Our Choices Every Day: The Science of Decision Making
What happens in your brain when you make decisions
Why we accept the default choice
Why we make worse decisions over time
Why we make better decisions in the morning
Why we make better decisions in a foreign language
How our bodies play a part in our decision-making
Why being hungry is bad for decision-making
Why a full bladder helps us make better choices
Why ventilation is important for good decision-making
Never miss an update from us. Join 100,000+ marketers and leaders.
Why leaning to the left affects your choices
Decision-making is not a pristine process. All sources of information creep into it, and we are just beginning to explore the role of the body in this.
How to make better decisions
1. Make your decisions in the morning
2. Eat first
3. Cut down your choices
4. Open the windows
5. Use a foreign language

Content: We’d rather not decide, so we’re likely to just stick with the default option if it’s already been chosen for us. When we get offered too many choices, the same thing happens—we shut down, unable to decide. Often, we end up simply choosing anything, just to get the process over and done with. Shai Danzinger’s study on parole hearings (which I reference in the next section) sums it up like this: We start suffering from “choice overload” and we start opting for the easiest choice. For example, shoppers who have already made several decisions are more likely to go for the default offer, whether they’re buying a suit or a car. click to share
Why we make worse decisions over time
Brian Bailey wrote about decision fatigue in an earlier post, which is essentially just a wearing-down of our decision-making abilities from overuse in a short period of time. The more decisions we make, the more tired our brain gets, leading us to either give less thought to our decisions or choose lower-risk, “safe” options simply to avoid the effort of making a difficult decision. For a judge hearing a parole case, that safer, low-risk option would be to deny parole and keep the prisoner behind bars. Unsurprisingly, this is just what judges generally do when they’ve had to make a lot of decisions in a row.