Choosing and Deciding

   

Enduring health is incremental and cumulative.  Outside biblical accounts, chronically and significantly sick people don't awaken one morning completely healed. Health-inducing behaviors need to be enacted rationally, frequently, and consistently to overcome natural physical entropy.

All this means that you need to develop and maintain behaviors that promote health and minimize illness.  You probably know, however, that most human behavior is automatic.  All else being equal, you will continue the helpful or harmful behaviors that have become your habits.

To take control of your health, you must make the best decisions that you can.  It is not a matter of choosing; it is a matter of deciding.  Choices too often are non-reflective, using heuristics --rules-of-thumb-- rather than careful thought.  Psychologists typically use the expression "fast and frugal" to emphasize the quick, effortless aspect of heuristics.  And given the pervasiveness of heuristics, research is devoted to that subject.

As one example, consider the work of S. Bobadilla-Suarez and B. Love (2017).  They questioned whether heuristics could be fast, frugal and still effective.  Their investigation compared a Tallying heuristic with a Take-the-Best heuristic. The former primarily involved culling a larger amount of information and then quickly choosing what seemed to lead to the best choice, and the latter, quickly searching a smaller amount of information only so long as needed to discover a reasonable answer.  

Applied to health practices, a Tallying heuristic might involve superficially skimming a list of weight reduction programs to choose the program with the most features shared among them.  By contrast, a Take-the-Best heuristic might involve skimming the same list in a search for the one that permits the dieter to consume the most calories.

Bobadilla-Suarez and Love found an effectiveness trade-off, such that either strategy could confer an advantage, sometimes favoring speed and other times, efficiency.   In some contexts, Tallying was more effective while Take-the-Best was faster, or vice versa.  Although either strategy might work in one given context, neither simultaneously included both a speed and efficiency advantage.

You may not be surprised that speed sacrifices efficiency and vice versa.  But when you make your automatic, heuristic choices, you probably are not mindful of that trade-off as it occurs in real time.

It is unrealistic to think that you will or should abandon all heuristic thinking.  After all, heuristics help reduce the effort required to make decisions.  However, many health decisions demand more than quick choices; you need to deliberate among your options, both to select the best ones and to overcome established unhealthful habits.

In short, you need to deliberate carefully before settling on heuristic choices.  To do so, consider the sources of your candidate heuristics.  Many heuristic preferences amount to instinctually imitating the behaviors and choices of your friends, acquaintances, or celebrities.  Even if you have created your own personal relatively autonomous heuristic choices, you should evaluate them objectively.  Some that you have created never worked properly, and some have worked properly in the past, but not now.  The bottom line is this: Your health is too valuable to manage via pure, automatic heuristics.  Take time to deliberate.  That, at minimum, gives you a chance to affirm or revise your heuristics to make them more compatible with a healthful lifestyle.

Reference

Bobadilla-Suarez, S., & Love, B. C. (2018). Fast or frugal, but not both: Decision heuristics under time pressure. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 44(1), 24-33. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/xlm0000419