This Neuroscientist Has a Simple Trick for Making Tough Decision-Making Instantly Easier

Imagine you’re facing a tough decision. Maybe it’s a business decision like which of four locations to pick for your company’s expansion. Or maybe it’s more personal, like which of four potential schools would be the best fit for your child. You’ve researched and racked your brains and you just can’t seem to pull the trigger on a final choice. 

This is a complicated subject, and if you’re looking for all the nitty-gritty details I point you to this fascinating Quanta Magazine article by Emily Singer. In it, she explains in great detail recent experiments on decision making Glimcher conducted using a simple and tasty model — identifying which candy bar study subjects would choose when faced with an array of choices. 

When the study subjects were only offered a couple of choices, they found picking easy. If they liked Snickers more than Almond Joy (like any sensible person would, if you ask me), they chose the Snickers. 

But when Glimcher and his team gave people 20 options, things went very differently. Even though each participant remained clear on their favorite candy bar overall, they often struggled to choose, agonizing over the array of treats before them. This seems irrational, so what’s going on? The neuroscientists measured the brain’s electrical activity to find out. 

They found that our brains show a spike in electrical activity when we view a choice we like — the bigger the spike, the stronger our preference. When we have just two options, it is easy for our brains to compare the size of two spikes. When we have many options to choose from, discerning which spike is biggest through all the mental noise gets a lot harder. Often, we get lost in analysis paralysis or make a choice we later regret. 

All of this is much more complicated in practice, and scientists are still very much debating the details. But Glimcher insists he can already make one simple real-world suggestion. Making your brain less noisy makes it easier to see your true preferences, and one simple way to do that is to just eliminate the option you like least. 

“Rather than pick what I hope is the best, instead I now always start by eliminating the worst element from a choice set,” Glimcher told Quanta, reducing the number of options to something manageable, like three. “I find that this really works, and it derives from our study of the math. Sometimes you learn something simple from the most complex stuff, and it really can improve your decision making.”

Niro Sivanathan, an organizational behavior professor at London Business School, explained to CNBC Make It that “most people make the forecasting error that in order to win people over, you need to get them lots of data,” but often “less is more. If you have just one key argument, be confident and put that on the table, rather than feeling the need to list many others.”

Are these latter two recommendations down to the same exact underlying brain functions? You’ll have to ask a neuroscientist. But even if you’re not up on the latest arguments over whether decision making happens in the parietal cortex or the frontal lobes, the key insight remains useful. 

More choices overwhelm us and tend to make it harder for us to weigh alternatives and make decisions. So if you find yourself struggling with a tough choice, your first move should be to reduce the number of options in front of you by eliminating the worst alternative.