The Irrational Art of Choosing

How often do you feel paralyzed when faced with too much choice? Don’t you go crazy when there are three pages of different pizzas on the menu? Or doesn’t Netflix drive you mad with all its suggestions, making you spend your night choosing what to watch, instead of just watching something?

An unpleasant sense of heaviness, via doze-mag.com

It is no coincidence that the father of rationalism and one of the greatest exponents of modernism, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, used to say, 'less is more'. Well, yes, he said it in the context of architecture, but his maxim lends itself well to becoming a more general philosophy.

Spoilt for choice
In our society, we are no longer used to having few choices. Even when it comes to shampoos, there are hundreds of possibilities for the same kind of hair. If there were only a few options, the choice would be simpler and more immediate, but when the shelves are full of bottles, it’s a struggle figuring out what we really need and want. Van der Rohe himself said that "to achieve clarity we have to simplify practically everything. It's hard work. You have to fight, and fight, and fight."
The fact is that unless we are talking about important choices, like taking out a home loan, buying a car, or having a baby, many times we have no desire to fight to make a decision. And if we don’t want to get involved in the decision-making process, who does it for us?

Image by Rosco Production 

We could say marketing itself, but that is only a lever. The real decision-maker is our unconscious mind.

The rules of marketing
Anyone involved in marketing knows that the consumers’ world is anything but rational. And that’s because if we were to reason over every choice we make, we would need days of 150 hours each to do everything that we normally do in 24. And maybe that would still not be enough. It may sound absurd, but the fact is that choosing is like breathing: most of the time we are unaware that we are doing it. And when we do realize it, it is because the situation is critical.

Tarot Taylar via Instagram 

Biases
It is as if our brain were a pilot: if it travels down a road for the first, second, or third time, it pays close attention to what it is doing. It notices all the features of that road, if it crosses paths you have already taken, it wonders if the one you are taking is the shortest way to your destination.
But once it has created a mental map of those places, it no longer needs to think about it to get you there. It puts you on autopilot and transports you straight to your destination.
On top of that, our brain is also a great saver, and tends to adopt many tricks to spend as little energy as possible: if a friend of yours, in whom you put a lot of trust, tells you something, you will believe him, and you will be willing to make his/her same choices, to adopt his/her judgment, without thinking about it too much. If, on the other hand, something looks like something you have already seen or done, then your brain will set up scenarios you already know as possible solutions. These are shortcuts that our driver takes to make us go faster. But they are called biases precisely because the conclusions they lead to are not the result of reasoning, but rather, actual distortions. This certainly applies in the world of marketing, but also outside, whenever we have to make a decision.

Norman Parkinson via Pinterest

Gut feeling
We are so used to this fallacious way of 'reasoning' that we have even developed a strong sensitivity to it. And when I say sensitivity, it is precisely to the senses that I am referring. Has it ever happened to you to find yourself in a context and simply 'feel' that it was wrong? Or, on the contrary, to make a decision without having the necessary elements to justify it, but feeling for certain that this was the right decision? It is as if the subconscious mind were aware of what the conscious mind is not yet aware of. It is called gut feeling, and it is an intuition derived from patterns identified in past experiences. Indeed, some neuroscientists claim that the mind is an intertwined system of brain and body, which helps explain why intuitive feelings are often accompanied by physical reactions.
The more experience one has in a field, the more one can trust one's instincts.

via media.vogue.com

Perfect imperfections
More than rational beings, we are rationalizers of emotional choices and, amazingly, we are so convoluted that we are able to use our experience as a tool to turn our emotions into inputs of reasonable choices.
Have you ever noticed this pattern in your life? Being aware of this coping method for our cognitive malfunctioning is a great advantage, helping us to turn a weakness into a virtue, and to embrace all those feelings that we can’t explain.
All this is to remind us that, as humans, we aspire to perfection, but we are imperfect, and that is perfectly fine.