Thanks for this link, CK!
This article is primarily about cognitive neuroscience, but I found it very useful because it explains the reason why complications creep into everyday decisions about simple chores. It helped me understand some of the modern factors that might inhibit one from cultivating simplicity as a life practice.
Here's an extract of particular relevance to this blog:
Jonah Lehrer says:
"In essence, my basic decision-making flaw is that I tend to treat easy consumer decisions (toothpaste, floss, shampoo, laundry detergent, etc.) as if they were really difficult. Although I know that every floss will work well enough, I still can’t help but contemplate the pros and cons of waxed versus unwaxed, spearmint versus wintermint. It’s an embarrassing waste of time, and yet it happens to me all the time.
Why do I do this? Why do I squander so much mental energy on the mundane purchases of everyday life? I think I’ve found a good answer.
I recently stumbled upon a working paper, “Decision Quicksand: When Trivial Choices Suck Us In,” by Aner Sela (University of Florida) and Jonah Berger (Penn). Their hypothesis is that my wasted deliberation in the drugstore is a metacognitive mistake. Instead of realizing that picking a floss is an easy decision, I confuse the array of options and excess of information with importance, which then leads my brain to conclude that this decision is worth lots of time and attention. Call it the drug store heuristic: A cluttered store shelf leads us to
automatically assume that a choice must really matter, even if it doesn’t. (After all, why else would there be so many alternatives?)"
Read the full article here.
This article is primarily about cognitive neuroscience, but I found it very useful because it explains the reason why complications creep into everyday decisions about simple chores. It helped me understand some of the modern factors that might inhibit one from cultivating simplicity as a life practice.
Here's an extract of particular relevance to this blog:
Jonah Lehrer says:
"In essence, my basic decision-making flaw is that I tend to treat easy consumer decisions (toothpaste, floss, shampoo, laundry detergent, etc.) as if they were really difficult. Although I know that every floss will work well enough, I still can’t help but contemplate the pros and cons of waxed versus unwaxed, spearmint versus wintermint. It’s an embarrassing waste of time, and yet it happens to me all the time.
Why do I do this? Why do I squander so much mental energy on the mundane purchases of everyday life? I think I’ve found a good answer.
I recently stumbled upon a working paper, “Decision Quicksand: When Trivial Choices Suck Us In,” by Aner Sela (University of Florida) and Jonah Berger (Penn). Their hypothesis is that my wasted deliberation in the drugstore is a metacognitive mistake. Instead of realizing that picking a floss is an easy decision, I confuse the array of options and excess of information with importance, which then leads my brain to conclude that this decision is worth lots of time and attention. Call it the drug store heuristic: A cluttered store shelf leads us to
automatically assume that a choice must really matter, even if it doesn’t. (After all, why else would there be so many alternatives?)"
Read the full article here.
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