Mind Moves:Decisions, decision, decisions. At this time in January when New Year resolutions can dissolve into New Year disillusions, a resolution that might remain is to examine our personal decision-making processes, writes Marie Murray
Decision-makers can be divided into deciders and ditherers. Deciders are unflinching, incisive individuals. They do not dally when choices must be made, regardless of how tough those decisions may be.
Ditherers, on the other hand, hesitate, vacillate and find committing to that "final answer" to be an unnerving affair. For, in their capacity to envisage all possibilities, they may become immobilised by the momentousness of each one. Deciders obtain the requisite information, determine the pros and cons, examine the pragmatics, check the potential consequences and, with an incisive sweep, they decide, act and implement. Ditherers engage in a more extensive process. There are ideological matters to be explored, short-term benefits and long-term costs to be balanced, potential pitfalls to be considered, until a level of certainty is achieved.
Of course the endless, exhausting, inconsequential daily decision-making required of us may explain the increase in dithering noticed in people today. Even the act of ordering a sandwich quickly becomes a serial dietary decision-making process: bagel or baguette, brown or white, butter or not, mustard or mayo? All must be declared before one even begins to decide what ingredients might decorate this nutritional escapade.
Then there is the selection of which communication medium to use to send a simple message to someone. Our capacity to contact is in inverse proportion to the many media available by which to do so: snail mail or e-mail, phone or text? And when we do decide, will the e-mail sit unopened or the mobile be powered off, the landline unanswered, and voicemail not picked up? As we become demented by being accessible to everyone, we become available to no one and creep towards blissful incommunicado to be alone.
Yet if we dislike decision-making, we do well to remember those who do not have the political freedom to make decisions for themselves. Disenfranchised citizens are truly incensed that others, not of their nomination, have power over them and if political decision-making is dismissive of public opinion there are repercussions. We do not forgive easily those who decide unfairly. What made the war in Iraq so unpopular was that the ordinary citizen with common sense would never have made that decision to invade.
Why? The logic was faulty. Ask any child. For a child knows that monstrous and malicious tyrants who can wipe you out in 45 minutes don't wait while you debate whether or not to invade. Simple.
The maxim "two heads are better than one" has research validity because group decisions incorporate a range of perspectives. Research into the efficacy of juries shows that larger juries debate more, recall more evidence, are less likely to force compliance and make better, more consistent decisions.
What makes television game shows popular is watching people decide whether to risk everything on a question or to take their winnings and run. Vicarious testing of one's judgment engages us - what would I do in that situation? We find out, without penalties.
Childhood, too, is about decisions being made for us, adolescence about asserting our independent right to make decisions for ourselves, life about learning how to discriminate and decide well.
Decision-making is relevant at every stage of our lives and one significant sign of depression is that we lose our capacity to decide anything at all. The study of heuristics is about how we decide - the mental methods by which we reduce complexity, and recognise the problem-solving biases that influence us.
But it is often not the big decisions that stupefy us; there are templates for major life decisions, informants to guide us, accumulated experience to forewarn us, and evidence to reassure us. It is in life's trivia that we become stressed. As information overload exhausts our capacity to sort, sift and decide, we may perish on whether to take the number 10 bus or the 46a, rather than whether we should marry, move house or emigrate. That is why there is so much dithering and a term has been found for it. Decidophobia, so named by the American philosopher Walter Kaufmann, is the fear of making the wrong decision. Yet fear of deciding is not new. Shakespeare's Hamlet could not decide whether "to be or not to be" and if it was better to put up with the misfortune that came his way or oppose it and end it. This is a big dilemma that still persists.
So whether we are deciders or dithers, perhaps we should remember that nothing is certain, that the information available today may be debunked tomorrow, that there may be arrogance in certitude and humility in uncertainty: the wisdom of knowing that there will always be knowledge and perspectives that supersede our own.
At least I think so. I think. Now.
• Clinical psychologist and author Marie Murray'slatest book is Living Our Times, published by Gill and Macmillan