"Two roads diverged in a yellow wood" says the narrator in Robert Frost's poem. After considering the two options, he adds "I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference." Like most of us, Frost's narrator makes the best choice he can and then goes through some Monday morning quarterbacking.
It seems simple enough.
So why do we need scientists to study human decisions? Why do scientists like me devote their whole careers to understanding decision-making? And why do some universities have whole departments devoted to decision-making? Well, decisions are more complicated than they seem. And Robert Frost was slyly reminding us about that in his poem's hidden message.
Wait, what? Hidden message? Isn't ‘The Road Not Taken' just a well-loved celebration of independence and non-conformity? Maybe not. Literary scholars think it's the poem is a case of literary irony - when the poem's real meaning is the opposite of what it seems to mean. Your high school English teacher probably missed that.
Come to think of it, the poem's narrator always seemed a little bit smug. It turns out Robert Frost did that on purpose. His poem was meant to be a subtle jab at people who rationalize their choices and definitively assert that they are where they are because of the choices they made. It's a philosophy that appeals to self-made successes. But decisions and their outcomes aren't so simple. Life isn't so simple. By studying these things, we can learn to make better decisions for ourselves and society.
I have been fascinated by decisions by as long as I can remember. When I was six, my Dad asked me whether I'd rather have a quarter or, heads or tails, a 50% chance of two quarters. I asked him for a day to think about it, and then I thought about it and thought about it. That night, I couldn't sleep. It was like the math problems we did in school, but I just could not see how to solve it! The next morning, I went with the quarter (today I'd go with the gamble).
My Dad's puzzle started a chain reaction in me. 27 years later, I now run a lab at the University of Rochester dedicated to studying how people make decisions. We study self-control, self-deception, counterfactual reasoning, and even very simple gambles like the one my Dad offered me. In this blog, I will introduce you to the science of decision-making, my research and other people's, and show how new results can help us navigate and interpret the modern world. My main message will be that decision-making is more complex - and more fascinating - than we might suspect. Just like the poem Robert Frost wrote almost 100 years ago.
