How to make better decisions | Dr. Joe Arvai | TEDxCalgary

I want to start by telling you the truth about decision making and the truth is something like human beings, they are defined by their skeletons, their cells, their tissues and their organs, like Dr. Currie talked about before with his dinosaurs, but as people you You define yourself by the

decisions

you

make

and the

decisions

you don't

make

. I teach decision making at the University of Calgary elsewhere and would like to teach using metaphors. and one of the metaphors that I like to use is to see the bigger picture and I like to show this slide to my students, I hope you enjoy it too and the question I would ask you is how many dolphins do you see and are there? nine that did not appear but there are nine there are arrows that would point to nine dolphins you can see them around the bodies you can see them in the middle part of the woman there you can see them everywhere and I I like this slide because it says that when it comes to taking When it comes to decisions we also don't see the big picture and one of the things we don't see when we talk about decision making is really important and that is our values ​​our values ​​are largely hidden from us when we make decisions that impact us and that impact others that surround us in many ways.

You can think of decision making as a mirror, a mirror that reflects your values ​​to other people, that's one way. To see it, you make decisions, you don't think about your values, but there are implicit values ​​that you reflect in the world around you. Another way to think about decision making. The way I prefer to think of it is that decision making is a lens that takes your values ​​that sharpens the zooms that bring them into focus and makes them materialize and the choices you make to illustrate this. We've done some research. One of the examples I will show you is relevant.

I think a lot of Calgarians and that has to do with the issue of ethical oil. My good friend Ezra Levant, who likes to criticize me from time to time, this is my way of getting back at him. We designed an experiment in which people could stop at a hypothetical gas. gas station much like you would approach a bar and in that bar, like if you could choose beers from different nations around the world, made with different ingredients and at different prices, you could open two gas pumps and get gas from different oils from different places in the world made in different ways and that the menu would look like this, that the environmental impacts of the extraction of that oil that produced that gas could be observed, the general environmental protection, the reputation of the country could be observed that produced that gas, you could look at that country's reputation for human rights, you could look at the greenhouse gas emissions from producing that quarter of gas from when you pulled it out of the ground to when you burned it in the car, and you could look at how much It really cost you that gas and if you ask Canadians, we asked a lot of Canadians to stop at this gas station, which pump would they stop at first?

The vast majority of Canadians would stop at the Canadian pump, the pump that produces oil. or that produces gas or that provides gas from the tar sands right here in Alberta if, on the other hand, we ask those same Canadians to pause for a second and reflect on the things that matter to them, their values, and to have Taking those values ​​into account in your decision making we see something like this, suddenly Canada's reputation doesn't matter as much, although it does matter a lot, what ends up mattering a lot more is what is happening today right now, what are we doing? in this country?

Now, in terms of the environment, what are we doing right now in this country in terms of greenhouse gas emissions and what are we doing to the climate? When do you get people to hold those values ​​accountable first and then go to the gas station? something happens, Canadian gas suddenly drops to fourth place, in fact, and in some of our experiments it drops to fifth place and this raises an important point at that point is that this does not mean that Canadian gas is an ethical gas. It just means that there are other things that

better

reflect our values ​​and we want to take that into account in the decisions we make because, like I said, decisions are important, they define who you are as a person if we ask. people Canadian Americans Europeans people in Asia which decision-making model do they prefer most people would tell us they would prefer to use the lens model would they prefer to pause reflect think about their values ​​use the lens to focus them and then use their decisions to manifest those values ​​in real life outcomes, but if you accept the idea that most of the decisions we make are looking in mirrors and if you accept the idea that we fail to see the big picture all the time, then we have to account for Another truth in decision making and this truth comes from my good friend Robin Gregory, another good friend Paul Slovic, and that truth is that when it comes to the vast majority of the decisions you make in your life, you are not simply an archaeologist.

It uncovers your preferences in your mind to cover pre-existing decisions you've made in the past or pre-existing preferences you have in the future because you can't have pre-existing preferences if you haven't thought carefully about your values ​​to start with who you are, instead, in decision making you are an architect, you are an architect who has to use the information that is present at the moment of the decision, point out the information that you bring to the table in terms of your values ​​and then you construct the decision. the best decision that you build at that moment at that moment the decision that reflects your values ​​any good architect will tell you that to do a good construction you need a building code and the building code for decision making looks like this, first we must Think about what our goals are, what our objectives are based on the values ​​we have.

We need to think about the options we have to choose from. We need to think about the outcomes and consequences of those alternatives in terms of the values ​​we hold. that we put on the table at the beginning and we need to think carefully about the trade-offs we are willing to make when we make decisions and the trade-offs we were not willing to make when we make decisions, ultimately decision making is about trade. -offs now Rahim mentioned something and that's true. I work a lot for the government. I work a lot for industry and in that work we use a lot of sophisticated simulations and computer models to get people to think more carefully about their values ​​and then feed those values ​​into big decisions and I'm not going to talk to you about that today because it implies that the decision making Decision making is really complicated and difficult and to some extent it is, but there is something about decision making that is natural. something we can all do, so the example I'm going to show you is an example from East Africa.

Some work we did in Tanzania in small Maasai villages for about three hours and that decision was to help people make

better

decisions about the water treatment systems they would use in their homes to avoid getting seriously ill and this is a photo of a boy in something called the bathroom, he's about half a mile from a small town where we work and you can see him dipping a cup into this kind of very brown chocolate, milky green water, he's about to take a drink. If you look behind the boy on the left, you will see clothes hanging.

If you look behind the boy on the right, you'll see something. people getting ready to do laundry, if you looked off camera to the right you would see some people bathing and if you came back dead at night you would also see some animals in the water so let me assure you that this is water you wouldn't want to drink regularly if I had a choice about it, so the question is what can we do in terms of the point of use of the water treatment systems that these people use to help them get better? options culturally relevant options options in line with their values ​​that would help them stay secure in fruitful lives the conversation began not with words because it was in a community that was used to dealing with Western researchers and analysts on topics like this, so the conversation It started with pictures and what you're seeing are eight pictures drawn by the Maasai in these little villages that we were working in at the time, we actually worked in quite a few villages at the time, to tell you the truth, top left. is a photo of a family a family that is happy and healthy because they are drinking safe water the photo to the right of the family is a paint brush reflecting the fact that the water has to be the correct color to the right of that is a flower reflecting the fact that water has to have the most appropriate smell the smell that is most in line with the values ​​of the people to the right of that is a piece of candy to recognize that water has to have the perfect taste in the bottom left a clock We need to be able to get clean, safe water in a timely manner to the right of that bucket.

It has to be as easy as simply dumping a large volume of water into a single bucket without much thought. The same goes for the pot you can just pour water into a pot, put the lid on it and cook, and to the right of that, that funny thing on the right that looks like a cashew and many of these villages there are not many Tanzanian shillings to go around, so people would go out into the environment, harvest cashews, take them to the market and trade them for whatever they needed, water treatment systems, if they wanted in this case, and the question here is how many cashews would it have cost them to get? the different water treatment systems that could help in terms of promoting your health.

There are a lot of options that fecal people could consider, from some very simple ones on the top left, a few drops of bleach, just taking water put it in a coke bottle put it on a roof and in sunlight for 24 hours and watch the UV rays take over boiling the water the ceramic filter is made locally - this really cool thing made by Procter & Gamble where you would need some powder put it in the brown water on the left and stir it for 15 minutes. I'm going to create crystal clear, safe water on the right. The methods we used really focused on getting people to think about how these different systems would align with their values ​​and they had to do that by testing all the different systems and then going to the trouble of aligning the alternatives with their values, how well each works. one of those systems in terms of color, taste, smell, safety, etc., what people actually chose.

Just as relevant is the fact that they chose water treatment systems that truly reflected what mattered most to them in their communities. It's something we can all do. It's just that we can all learn from some truly beautiful people. wondering at this point I make a lot of decisions and every day and you're right how much of this is too much if we're going to do this building code saying how much we have to do right I have good news and There's bad news on that front in terms of all the decisions that we make. you take in your daily life and we have studied a lot of different types.

The best thing we found is that you are 50-50 calibrated to your values ​​for most of the decisions you make. That is, with the vast majority of decisions you make in a day, you are only achieving 50% of your values ​​with each of those decisions and that decreases dramatically as the decisions become more complicated, so an answer to the question is: We need to use our building code for all types of decisions, all of our decisions, if we want, the disadvantage of this is that we make thousands of decisions every day and if we stop to think about each of those options with be very careful, it would take us a long time, so there is another trade-off that I want you to think about and that is the trade-off between something we call precision and effort, if you can think that this decision that I have to make to do it well requires a high degree of precision , then it probably requires a high degree of effort and you should apply the building code if you're talking about the decisions you can make wrong and still live through the day the decisions you can make wrong and correct tomorrow Those don't require the building code, you can learn it take the step and I encourage you to do it because life is short and it should be fun and sometimes you have as much fun making mistakes as having great successes so think about effort and precision there is something else I want you to think about and It's just that there's nothing free when you make decisions like this and when you start thinking about your values ​​and when you start applying the building code and when you start thinking about how your different alternatives align with what you really care about, something really interesting happens. as you make decisions in that environment you start to question them more, so the person who doesn't think too much about their values ​​and blindly goes about their day making decisions is a pretty happy person because they don't actually think too much about the consequences of those choices. because they did not stop to think beforehand about the consequences of those electionsAs you start to think about those consequences and make your decisions now you have a reference point to look back on and now that reference point can be used when in doubt.

Did I make the right decision? Would you have been happier if you chose something else? Would you have achieved a better result if you had chosen something else? I have chosen something else and that is also completely natural, it is part of the human condition. And we should not consider a building code for decision making as something that is making your life miserable, so what we want to do with the code of construction is adding an extra step and that step looks at decision making in a new way most of you and certainly I think about that we often think of decision making as something we do once we have a problem we face When given an opportunity we need to make a decision we make it we wipe our hands and move on let me tell you another truth decision making is something you do throughout your life, even a decision you make today about what cell phone to buy or what car to drive or what clothes - where is there something that you can learn over time, so decision making should be considered as something that is a lifelong activity and an organic activity that evolves just as you evolve over time, so we want to add an extra step to our building code and that's after you've made a decision, monitor that decision, how do you monitor that decision?

You look at the decision you just made and think about how much that decision is now playing out for me in my real life. You address the values ​​I articulated at the beginning. Are you doing a good job? Are you doing a bad job? I could change my decision. Are my values ​​changing? I sure better change my decision now, so monitor that decision. Learn about the results. Learn about yourself and adapt over time. So I have said many things. Is there any advantage to it? I think there is and is a pretty big advantage to all of this and I'm going to go back to what I said at the beginning: you are defined by the decisions you make, the decisions you make project the values ​​you have. to the world around you, so I think it's up to you, it's certainly up to me to take the time to think about what my values ​​are, to think about how those values ​​affect the decisions that I'm about to make and what those decisions are. .

What it means to the people around me. I think we all want to be the best people we can be, and to be the best people we can be, we have to start thinking carefully about what our values ​​are, but there's more to it. you begin to make decisions that are in line with your values, you begin to reflect not only your choices to others, but also your values ​​to others, those others are members of your family, they are your friends and perhaps, above all, there are leaders. I think right now we go out into the world and we make a decision every four or five years about who we're going to choose to guide us in the world and that's a decision we make and we wipe our hands of it and move on and forget about it, but the The reality is that you can make every decision you make in every day of your life, use it to project your values ​​to those around you, to the leaders above you, to hold them accountable, to hold them accountable, for what matters to you, about what matters to your community. what matters to your family I think that's important so that's the truth the truth is that your decisions matter the truth is that your values ​​matter and the truth is that until you start aligning those two things I don't think we're going to We will be making our world a much better place for a long time, but on a positive note, small incremental changes, small building codes can help us a lot and I encourage you to try them tonight on the way home and tomorrow and the day after, thank you .