The conscious mind requires effort, but the unconscious mind is constantly at work to make sense of the world and to be prepared for instant decisions.
When a saber-toothed cat appeared in early man’s peripheral vision, he did not spend a lot of time contemplating his best options. He instantly reacted with the best information he had at that point from all his past experiences that might relate to the subject at hand.
He might not have had the full range of information that might have helped him, but the maps in his mind gave him an instant answer that might have been all he needed.
We are not that different today. We are constantly confronted with decisions that need to be made on the spot that may or may not be life-threatening. Driving in traffic, deciding who to vote for, choosing clothing, or a life-partner. In every case we make decisions with the help of our conscious minds, but biased tremendously by a vast amount of information we are not aware of.
Our subconscious minds take what we know and construct a story to explain a situation. It is within this story that decisions are made. The story is created as the most coherent story from all the available relevant material, or WYSIATI – What You See Is All There Is. It is a good enough system to keep us from Saber-tooths, but maybe not the best for choosing a mate.
The system is vulnerable to biases of judgement including overconfidence, which has been recently popularized as the Dunning-Kruger effect [ Which we will talk about in an upcoming blog ] and by Framing effects that allow us to make quick judgements that we stand by despite mountains of evidence to the contrary. In future blogs we will cover many of these biases that allow humans to make spectacularly poor decisions and stand by them to their detriment.
But WYSIATI is at the heart of it all, the instantaneous mapping of our world inside our brains that allows us to operate in a complex world. But we are not limited to this, we have the ability to recognize the limitations and make decisions that are … wiser.