Internal and External Influences on Healthful Lifestyle Decisions

Ultimately our health mostly is impacted by our decisions.  And since our decision making often is flawed, the more we understand our approaches, the better.  For instance, common sense indicates that decisions under stress are qualitatively different from decisions made calmly.  When stressed, we tend to give excessive import to information about rare circumstances and inadequate weight to information from our frequent personal experiences.  For instance, when suffering extraordinary problems at work, a healthy person undergoes a routine physical examination, is told that his heart rate is slightly accelerated, and decides that he needs an immediate cardiac catherization  to stave off an impending heart attack.  By reasoning thus, the frightened person “forgets” the fact that he always has had annual physicals that never revealed any major heart problems.  That is, he discounts the more likely fact that would be based on his personal experiences of past physicals, and seizes upon a more remote possibility based on his immediate interpretation of information just disclosed.

In addition to your personal opinions, health decisions are sometimes based upon information derived from outside yourself,  Such information,for instance, might issue from something that you read, the Internet, a media report, or from face to face interaction.  Your education and personality, including your levels of openness and self-confidence, are critical in determining the balance of looking within or looking without for data to determine your decisions.

Ido Erev and colleagues (2017) concluded that contemporary psychological research points to three major factors that determine most decision making.  First, we depend on our subjective opinions about the probability that given information is accurate.  That means, for instance, that I place more weight on "facts" that I personally have perceived through my life experiences.  Second, we also rely on heuristics - rules of thumb - so that I trust that when in doubt I should choose a less risky option.  Finally, when attempting to reach a decision, I retrieve from memory facts that I deem relevant to the decision at hand.  If I remember having had good results from prescription medication and poor results from generics, that will guide  my current choice.  The three major factors of course need not be mutually exclusive.  Even personal life experiences could have been affected significantly by external influences.

The researchers in question concluded that regardless of the initial source of information, feedback predictably influenced decision makers’ behaviors.  When provided initial information, the subjects’ reached decisions based on four major parameters:  their level of pessimism , their recognition of the likelihood of maximizing a positive outcome, equal weighting (presuming that all outcomes under consideration were at least possible), and their attitude toward the decision regret.   Moreover, the subjects’ pre-experiment life experiences decreased their inclinations toward decision pessimism, likelihood of maximizing  positive outcome, and equal weighting. By contrast, pre-experiment life experiences increased the impact of regret on decision making. Therefore, both initial and subsequent data could enable any or all of the four  parameters to be modified by decision-oriented feedback.

Although factors other than those that Erev investigated can be important for determining health decisions, his study should alert us to the following:  We need to look inward and outward for information related to our health.  We should not delude ourselves into believing the we have all the answers.  But health information must be personalized in a manner that only you can achieve. For instance, only you understand your stressors in enough depth to understand their effects on you.  Only you know your life experiences, customary heuristics, and memories that pertain to any health issue.  Similarly, only you can decode your level of pessimism , expectations of maximizing a positive outcome, appreciation for equal weighting, and attitude toward decision regret.  

The challenge for you and for me is to balance internal and external influences sufficiently to make decisions affording the best chance of achieving our health goals.  Since we all mostly operate on automatic pilot, we first must be conscious of the importance of making deliberate health decisions, and then take the considerable time and exert the considerable effort necessary to timely execute the require actions. 

  

Reference:

Erev, I., Ert, E., Plonsky, O., Cohen, D. & Cohen, O. (2017).  From Anomalies to Forecasts: Toward a Descriptive Model of Decisions Under Risk, Under Ambiguity, and From Experience.  Psychological Review, Mar 09 , 2017, No Pagination Specified. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/rev0000062