December 13, 2017, by apyjts

Are you really making the right decisions?

Decisions come in three varieties.

Rational Decisions: when we make decisions we weigh up the outcomes, giving each outcome an arbitrary value of how beneficial it would be for you. Whichever outcome is the most beneficial is the best one to choose.

Irrational Decisions: weighing up the possible outcomes of a decision and choosing the worst possible option would be an irrational decision.

For example, I might have to choose between doing an assignment that’s due in tomorrow, or watching the latest episode of Game of Thrones. I’d definitely enjoy watching Game of Thrones, but it’d be much more beneficial for me to get my work done sooner rather than later. Since I value my grades more than a show I can catch up on later, doing my assignment would be the rational decision.

Non-rational Decisions: some decisions aren’t rational or irrational. If we can’t possibly know the value of an outcome the decision is non-rational.

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But how could we not know the value of the outcomes?

According to research by Laurie Paul, any decision that leads to a transformative experience is a non-rational one. There are two types of transformative experience:

Epistemically transformative experiences lead us to learn something that we couldn’t have possibly known otherwise – it grants us a kind of special knowledge.

Personally transformative experiences bring about a drastic change in our preferences, or in our outlook on life. Having a child, for example, would bring about such a huge change in my lifestyle that I wouldn’t be able to assess the value of having a child or not. Therefore, it would be a non-rational decision.

You may think you’ve been making rational decisions, but are they actually non-rational?

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