This is the third of five posts in my sequence of essays about my life philosophy, Valuism – here are the first, second, fourth, and fifth parts (though the links won’t work until those other essays are released).

Sometimes, people take an important value – maybe their most important value – and decide to prioritize it above all other things. They neglect or ignore their other values in the process. In my experience, this often leaves people feeling unhappy. It also leads them to produce less total value (according to their own intrinsic values). I think people in the effective altruist community (i.e., EAs) are particularly prone to this mistake.

In the first post in this sequence, I introduce Valuism – my life philosophy – and offer some general arguments for its advantages. In this post, I talk about the interaction between Valuism and effective altruism. I argue that the way some EAs think about morality and value is (in my view) empirically false, potentially psychologically harmful, and (in some cases) incoherent. 

EAs want to improve others’ lives in the most effective way possible. Many EAs identify as hedonic utilitarians (even the ones who reject objective moral truth). They say that impartially maximizing utility among all conscious beings – by which they usually mean the sum of all happiness minus the sum of all suffering – is the only thing of value, or the only thing that they feel they should value. I think this is not ideal for a few reasons.

1. I think (in one sense) it’s empirically false

Consider a person who claims that “only utility is valuable.”

If we interpret this as an empirical claim about the person’s own values – i.e., that the sum of happiness minus suffering for all conscious beings is the only thing that their brain assigns value to – I think that it’s very likely empirically false. 

That is, I don’t think anyone only values (in the sense of what their brain assigns value to) maximizing utility, even if it’s a very important value of theirs. I can’t prove that literally nobody only values maximizing utility, but I argue that human brains aren’t built to only value one thing, nor would we expect evolution to converge on pure utilitarian psychology since evolution optimizes for survival (a purely utilitarian brain would get rapidly outcompeted by other brain types if they existed 50,000 years ago). 

I think that even the most hard-core hedonic utilitarians do psychologically value some non-altruistic things deep down – for example, their own pleasure (more than the pleasure of everyone else), their family and friends, and truth. However, in my opinion, they sometimes deny this to themselves or feel guilty about it. If you are convinced that your only intrinsic value is utility (in a hedonistic, non-negative-leaning utilitarian sense), you may find it instructive to take a look at these philosophical scenarios I assembled or check out the scenarios I give in this talk about values.

For instance, does your brain actually tell you it’s a good trade (in terms of your intrinsic values) to let a loved one of yours suffer terribly in order to create a mere 1% chance of preventing 101 strangers from the same suffering? Does your brain actually tell you that equality doesn’t matter one iota (i.e., it’s equally good for one person to have all the utility compared to spreading it more equally)? Does your brain actually value a world of microscopic, dumb orgasming micro-robots more than a world (of slightly less total happiness) where complex, intelligent, happy beings pursue their goals? Because taken at face value, hedonic utilitarianism doesn’t care about whether a person is your loved one or a stranger, doesn’t care about equality at all, and prefers microscopic orgasming robots to complex beings as long as the former are slightly happier. But, if you consider yourself a hedonic utilitarian, is that actually what your brain values?

2. It can be psychologically harmful

Additionally, I think the attitude that there is only one thing of value can lead to severe psychological burnout as people try to push away, minimize or deny their other intrinsic values and “selfish,” non-altruistic desires. I’ve seen this happen quite a few times. Here’s Tyler Alterman’s personal account of this if you’d like to see an example. And here’s a theory of how this burnout happens.

3. I think (in one sense) it’s incoherent

When coupled with a view that there is no objective moral truth, I think it is, in most cases, philosophically incoherent to claim that total hedonic utility is all that matters.

If you believe in objective moral truth, it may make sense to say, “I value many things, but I have a moral obligation to prioritize only some of them” (for example, you might be convinced by arguments that you are objectively morally obliged to promote utility impartially even though that’s not the only value you have).

However, many EAs, like me, don’t believe in objective moral truth. If you don’t think that things can be objectively right or wrong, it doesn’t make sense (I claim) to say that you “should” prioritize maximizing utility for all of humanity over other values – what does this “should” even mean? Well, there are some answers for what this “should” could mean that philosophers and lay people have proposed, but I find them pretty weak.

For a much more in-depth discussion of this point (including an analysis of different ways that EAs have responded to my critique of pairing utilitarianism with denial of objective moral truth), see this essay. It collects may different objections (from EAs and from some philosophers) and discusses them. So if you are interested in whether it is or isn’t coherent to only value utility when you deny objective moral truth, and moreover, whether EAs and philosophers have good arguments for doing so, please see that essay.

I find that while many (perhaps the majority of) EAs deny objective moral truth, many still talk and think as though there is objective moral truth.

I found it striking that, in my conversations with EAs about their moral beliefs, few had a clear explanation for how to combine a belief in utilitarianism with a lack of a belief in objective moral truth, and the approaches to that that they did put forward were usually quite different from each other (suggesting, at the very least, a lack of consensus in how to support such a perspective). Some philosophers I spoke to pointed to other ways one might defend such a position (mainly drawn from the philosophical literature), but I don’t recall ever seeing these approaches being used or referenced by non-philosopher EAs (so they don’t seem to be doing much work in the beliefs of EAs who hold this view). 

I suspect it would help many EAs if they took a more Valuist approach: rather than claiming to or aspiring to only value hedonic utility, they could accept that while they do intrinsically value this – very likely far more than the average person – they also have other intrinsic values, for example, truth (which I think is another very important psychological value for many EAs), their own happiness, and the happiness of their loved ones.

Valuism also avoids some of the most awkward bullets that EAs sometimes are tempted to bite. For instance, hedonic utilitarianism seems to imply that your own happiness and the happiness of your loved ones “shouldn’t” matter to you even a tiny bit more than the happiness of a stranger who is certain to be born 1,000,000 years from now. Valuism may explain why people who identify as hedonic utilitarians may feel a great deal of internal conflict about this – even if you value the happiness of all sentient beings a tremendous amount, you almost certainly have other intrinsic values too. That means that Valuism may help you avoid some of the awkward conundrums that arise from ethical monism (where you assume that there is only one thing of value).

Valuism and the EA Community

From a Valuist perspective, I see the EA community as a group of people who share a primary intrinsic value of hedonic utility (i.e., reducing suffering and increasing happiness impartially) with a secondary strong intrinsic value of truth-seeking. Oddly (from my point of view) EAs are very aware of their intrinsic value of impartial hedonic utility, but seem much less aware of their truth-seeking intrinsic value. On a number of occasions, I’ve seen mental gymnastics used to justify truth-seeking in terms of increasing hedonic utility when (I claim) a much more natural explanation is that truth-seeking is an intrinsic value (not just an instrumental value that leads to greater hedonic utility). This helps explain why many EAs are so averse to ever lying and so averse even to persuasive marketing.

Each individual EA has other intrinsic values beyond impartial utility and truth-seeking, but in my view, those two values help define EA and make it unique. This is also a big part of why this community resonates with me: those are my top two universal intrinsic values as well.

If more EAs adopted Valuism, I think that they would almost all continue to devote a large fraction of their time and energy toward improving the world effectively. Maximizing global hedonic utility (i.e., the sum of happiness minus suffering for conscious beings) is the strongest universal intrinsic value of most community members, so it would still play the largest role in determining their goals and actions, even after much reflection. 

However, they would also feel more comfortable investing in their own happiness and the happiness of their loved ones at the same time, which I predict would make them happier and reduce burnout. Additionally (I claim), they’d accept that, like many effective altruists, they also have a strong intrinsic value of truth. They’d strike a balance between their various intrinsic values, and not endorse annihilating all their intrinsic values except for one.

I published this piece on this site on March 10, 2023.

If you read this line, please do us a favor and click here to answer one quick question.

You’ve just finished the second post in my sequence of essays on my life philosophy, Valuism – click here to go to the fourth post.

Think of something you value that:

A. Multiple other people you know are capable of achieving, but that…

B. You assume you would not be capable of achieving, even though…

C. You have never actually tried to do this thing well before.

Now, suppose for a moment that you have no choice but to do the thing. That is, everything you care about in the world will be destroyed if you do not achieve it in X months. Here, X could be 1 if it’s a very small thing, or X could be 100 if it’s a much larger thing.

Under those circumstances, do you STILL believe you would fail to achieve it?

I think this sort of thought experiment can help us distinguish between things that we don’t believe we are capable of merely because we aren’t motivated enough, versus things that we ACTUALLY believe are impossible for us.

And I think it’s important to distinguish between these two cases, because if something is in the first category, we may actually be able to get ourselves to succeed just by finding ways to increase our motivation!

I also suspect that for many people, a number of the things that they view as being impossible for them would seem more possible in the face of carrying out this thought experiment. In other words, it is easy to confuse “I’m not motivated enough to try really hard” with “I’m incapable.”

As an example, suppose you believe you are just inherently bad at math, and that no matter how hard you try, you couldn’t understand calculus. Well, what if the fate of the world rested on your understanding of calculus in 6 months? I think under those circumstances, you would very likely find a way to learn it, with plenty of time to spare.

This piece was first written on April 26, 2018, and first appeared on my website on September 22, 2025.

Suppose there are two villages, “Smallville” and “Largeford,” which are a 5-minute walk apart. There are 100 people in Smallville and 200 people in Largeford – so Largeford has twice as many people in it.

According to their ancient traditions, ALL of the people in the two villages must meet once per month in one of the two villages to carry out a ritual. The ritual requires all people from BOTH villages be in one of the two villages at the same time. Hence, the people from Smallville must all go to Largeford, or the people of Largeford must all go to Smallville. For the sake of this thought experiment, we’ll assume that the ritual must be conducted, or else the world will end.

Unfortunately, despite the short distance between the villages, a painful, poisonous cactus patch lies on the only passable path between them. Any person who passes through the cactus patch gets poisoned, which is not dangerous but causes a lot of pain.

The feeling of being poisoned by these cactuses is awful, regardless of how many times they’ve experienced it before, but due to genetic differences, the people of Smallville experience 3 times more pain from the poison than the people of Largeford.

Now here’s the tricky question for you. Each month, either all the people of Smallville, who are three times more sensitive to the poison, have to cross the cactus patch to go to Largeford, or the people of Largeford, consisting of twice as many people, have to cross the cactus patch to go to Smallville. But it doesn’t have to be the same group crossing each time.

So, from an ethical perspective, what percentage of months should the people of Smallville have to be the ones crossing the cactus patch to get to Largeford (rather than the people of Largeford crossing the cactus patch to get to Smallville)?

Assume that one or the other group really does have to cross each month, the population sizes don’t change, and there is no way to clear away the cactuses or avoid the poison.

Once you give your percentage in the comments or give up on trying to answer, scroll down to see explanations for different possible percentages you could give!

Scroll down only after you’ve given your answer.

[Pedantic rules: the cactus patch is impossible to clear away given the current state of Smallville/Largeford technology. The population sizes of the two villages stay constant. Monthly meetings cannot take place anywhere besides one of those two villages. The villages cannot be moved. Assume the people of both villages are equally morally deserving and equally wealthy per capita. No armor or bridges, or antidotes are allowed.]

Possible answers to “What percentage of months should the people of Smallville have to be the ones crossing the cactus patch to get to Largeford?”

Utilitarian sum solution: 0% – minimize total suffering (the people of Smallville each suffer three times more from the poison than the people of Largeford, so even though there are 1/2 as many of them, 3*(1/2)=1.5x more total suffering occurs each time they cross the cactus patch than if the Largeford people do, so the Smallville people should never cross, hence 0%)

Capitalist trade negotiation solution: 0% – suppose that on average, the unpleasantness of the cactus patch for a person from Largeford is worth 1 unit of the Largeford/Smallville currency (so that a person from Largeford would be indifferent between crossing the patch and receiving 1 unit), and by extension, that crossing the cactus patch is worth three units of currency to a person of Smallville since people of Smallville suffer three times as much. Then the villagers of Smallville could (for example) each pay slightly more than two units to the villagers of Largeford in order for Largeford to have to do the walking every time, and it will be worth it for both sides to agree. However, a different bargain could also be struck (depending on the negotiating skills on each side and the impression that each side has of what will happen in the event of no agreement being struck).

Equal individual suffering solution: 25% – each person shares an identical amount of the burden by suffering an equal amount as every other person (if the Smallville have to cross the patch 25% of the time, then out of every four months, each member of the Smallville experiences total suffering from 0.25 ( 3 units of suffering, 4 months of each year = 3 versus 0.75 * 4 months * 1 unit of suffering = 3 for the Largeford people, so each person suffers equally regardless of which group they are in)

Equal total group burden solution: 40% – rather than each person sharing the same amount of the burden of suffering, we could have the two GROUPS each have the same total amount of suffering. If Smallville crosses 40% of the time, then that group’s total suffering per meeting is 0.40 x 100 x 3 = 120, compared to Largeford, which then has total suffering per meeting of 0.60 x 200 x 1 = 120. With this solution, the total sum of suffering experienced by each group is the same as what the other group experiences.

Group fairness solution: 50% – each group gets the same treatment as each other group, so each group walks half the time regardless of the number of people per group or amount of suffering per person (or a coin is flipped to see which group walks each time)

Individual equal action solution: 50% – each person has to walk as often as each other person (regardless of how much they suffer); hence each group walks half the time

Equal chance of choosing a solution: 66.66% – pick a person at random by having everyone draw sticks each time, and let the winning person choose which group walks that time (so each person, assuming they are acting selfishly, will choose to have the other group walk when they are chosen, but 66.66% of the people live in Largeford, so the Smallville walk 66.66% of the time)

Democratic majority vote solution: 100% – each person gets a vote, and the larger village wins the vote every time due to having the majority; hence the smaller village walks every time.

Note: I originally called this thought experiment the Poison-Cactus-Vampire-Ward Problem but I changed its name to make it simpler

• decide whether to marry your boyfriend or girlfriend
• choose between two job offers in different fields
• decide whether to finish your PhD program or drop out
• pick between two cities that you’re thinking of moving to

These kinds of decisions can be excruciatingly hard, and people often waffle in an unpleasant state for months trying to choose what to do. But fortunately, there are some strategies one can apply to help make the decision process shorter, and increase the chance that your ultimate decision does the best job of promoting what you value.

First, it’s important to know what not to do, as there are many pitfalls that arise in complicated decision-making situations.

Trap 1: Don’t just select the default. With some choices, there is a default that will occur if no choice is actively made. It is easy to select this default merely because you become paralyzed by the difficulty of the decision-making, or because you deliberate until the time runs out. Examples of this happening include: staying in your current city, merely because you couldn’t decide whether to move to another one, or maintaining your company’s existing business strategy merely because you couldn’t make the decision of which strategy to switch to. The default option is of course not always a bad one, but it is important to make sure not to choose it merely because it is the default.

One possible strategy for avoiding this default bias is to pre-commit to making a thought out decision by a specific date. You can recruit a friend or business colleague to hold you accountable. The deal will be that you have to send him a 400 word explanation of what you chose and why by the specified date, and if you don’t, you owe a certain amount of money for every day that you go over this deadline. Write a check and give it to that friend now, which he will cash and begin to spend on himself if you don’t meet the cutoff date. Just be sure to set the deadline far enough away to give yourself plenty of time to think about and research the problem thoroughly (keeping in mind that the human tendency is to underestimate how long projects will take).

Trap 2: Don’t just select whatever benefits you most right now. Frequently choices pit near term benefits against longer term ones. You could avoid talking to your friend who is angry at you, which benefits you short-term, or try to understand why he is angry, which will involve an awkward conversation and possibly getting yelled at. You could stay at your current job which you don’t like but don’t hate, or go through the frustrating and time-consuming process of cover letters, interviews and rejections, in the hope of landing a job you love.

Since we tend to be biased towards doing what is pleasant now, it’s important to correct for this when considering our choices. Near term benefits ideally should count for something, but how good you feel today from a decision, or even how good you feel for the rest of this month, is often of little consequence compared to how good your life will be for years to come as a result of your choice. So, for life changing decisions that are likely to have strong long-term effects on your happiness or other values, near term benefit shouldn’t factor into the decision-making process much. In these cases, it may be helpful to frame the decision mentally as “which of these choices will be best for me long-term”, rather than “which of these choices is best for me”. By specifically ignoring short-term benefit, the former phrasing of the question may help you be less biased by what is convenient or pleasant right now. Of course, in cases where the near term effects of a decision are a substantial part of the total effects, this method isn’t appropriate, and short-term benefits or losses need to be explicitly considered.

Trap 3: Don’t focus only on a few noticeable details. Sometimes the aspects of a situation that come to mind most easily or most vividly are not representative of the situation as a whole. For instance, if you are trying to decide whether to have children, what may come to mind is the image of reading a story to your children while they listen attentively with smiles on their faces. But someone else might get the image of changing a diaper while their child screams. While both of these images represent aspects of raising children, neither comes close to capturing the experience comprehensively. But depending on which of the two images comes to mind when you reflect on having children, you might end up making a different decision.

To be a good decision maker, it’s important that you not selectively focus on one feature of a situation, but rather view it more broadly. It can help to imagine the various aspects of the situation one by one, trying to mentally weight the frequently occurring and more likely aspects more heavily (for instance, by visualizing them for longer). When you think about having children, you should reflect both on your children smiling, and on them crying. You should also spend lots of  time focusing on the most common moments of child raising.

Trap 4: Don’t exaggerate the importance of a decision. People tend to overestimate the impact of both negative and positive events on their long-term happiness. Keeping this in mind can reduce the chance of obsessing about a decision, and can also help stop decision paralysis caused by the fear that a wrong decision would be devastating to your future. There is a decent chance that whichever option you choose, in the long-term you will be about as happy as you are now. So try not to give a decision more weight that in deserves. It’s especially easy to overestimate the importance of something merely because you happen to be reflecting on it. To help avoid these issues, try imagining what life would be like one year after the decision for each of the possible options you could take. How sure are you that you would feel significantly different on a day-to-day basis if you take option A rather than B?

For decisions that aren’t that important, it’s especially easy to make yourself less happy overall by worrying about them too much. A half hour of frustrated deliberation is probably not worth it when you’re deciding how to spend the $5 coupon you just got. Even if you make the “wrong” choice with the coupon, you’ll probably be happier on net without having wasted the time and given yourself the extra stress. And don’t forget that your time is worth money.

Now that we’ve considered traps to watch out for, let’s take a look at some strategies you can apply to help improve really important decisions in complex situations.

Strategy 1: Think about the advice you would give a friend. Sometimes it is helpful to forget for a moment that it is your own life you are deciding about. Imagine that a friend of yours (who you’d really like to help) is dealing with a decision very much like yours. Visualize her situation vividly, as though it were really occurring. Now imagine that this friend asks you which choice she should pick for herself. What would you tell her?

This method helps us detach ourselves from the emotions of the situation, which can sometimes prevent us from making the right choice. For instance, suppose that you’re trying to decide whether to break up with your boyfriend. Even though you enjoy being with him, you know he isn’t the sort of person you’d like to be with long-term. It can be a lot easier to give good advice to a friend who is in such a situation than to reflect in an unbiased fashion on what will be best for both you and your boyfriend in the long run. Fear of upsetting your boyfriend could stop you from breaking up with him now. But if your friend was in the same situation, you’d realize that this fear of hurting the boyfriend is not a good enough reason not to break up.

Strategy 2: List the pros and cons. Sometimes it takes careful thought to be aware of all the pluses and minuses of taking a particular course of action. Taking time to reflect on these and make a list of them can give you a significantly more complete understanding of the situation. Having a friend help is even better, since they may be able to think of advantages and disadvantages that you wouldn’t have. Once this list is complete, read it over a couple of times to help your brain process the entire list.

Keep in mind that when you come up with the pros and cons of multiple options, you need to have a baseline option to compare against, and this baseline needs to be the same for each of the options. So pick a baseline situation, and then what you will list as a pro and con will be determined with respect to this baseline. If your baseline includes an hour of free time per day, and one of your other options also offers an hour of free time per day, this is neither a pro or a con, it is merely neutral with respect to this baseline. If another option offers an hour and a half of free time a day though, then 30 minutes of extra free time each day would count as a pro for this option, since its offers 30 minutes more free time a day than the baseline.

Strategy 3: Do a full cost benefit analysis. If you want a formal procedure for making a really tough decision, try this one. Again come up with a list of pros and cons for each option, but this time also come up with three numbers for each of these pros and cons. The first number is a probability, which is your rough estimate of how likely this pro or con is to come into play at all if you choose the given option. The second, is an estimate of the benefit (or harm) towards your happiness or other goals this pro or con would cause on average on a weekly basis, assuming that the pro or con does in fact occur. A value of 1 would indicate a slight benefit on a weekly basis, whereas a score of 10 would indicate an extremely large weekly average benefit. A value of -1 would indicate a slight harm on a weekly basis, and a score of -10 wold indicate an extremely large harm weekly. The third and final number to estimate for each pro and con is how many weeks, on average, you can expect this benefit or harm to last, again assuming that the pro or con does occur to begin with. Once you’ve estimated these three numbers for a pro or con, multiply them together to get your total score for that pro or con. Now sum up these scores for all of them associated with a given option to get a total score of how good that option is, on net. Do this for each of the options, and compare the scores. If one of the options has a much higher total score than the other options, that is probably the one you should go with.

Why three numbers for each pro and con? Well, pros ands cons that are likely to occur should count more, ones that have a greater impact should count more, and those that last for longer should count more. So we consider (a) the chance of that pro or con occurs at all, (b) how good it will be on average during periods it does occur, and (c) how long (i.e. how many of those periods) you will get to enjoy that benefit for if it does in fact occur at all. Multiplying these three factors together for each pro and con, and then summing the result for all pros and cons corresponding to an option, is a way of estimating the expected value (i.e. total value, on average) of that option.

Strategy 4: Gather data about others who have made the same choices. Sometimes it is possible to figure out how well your choices worked for other people (or how similar situations worked out for you in the past), which can inform your decision now. If you think there are compelling reasons why your situation is different from these other people’s, you can at least start with the estimates derived from considering the experiences of others, and then adjust up or down based on these differences. For instance, suppose that you are thinking about quitting your steady job and trying to become a Broadway star. It shouldn’t be too difficult to determine that this goes poorly for most people who try it. If, however, you’re unusually good-looking, have objective evidence that you’re a fantastic singer even by Broadway standards, and happen to be friends with a lot of people who run theatre companies with shows on Broadway, this information should cause you to revise your chance of success upwards well above the typical levels. Note though that when considering what to do, people usually underestimate the relevance of how things typically turn out for others confronted with similar options. So it’s important to do this research when possible,  and not overestimate how special or unique your situation is. If things almost always go badly for people that select a certain choice, then they’ll most likely go badly if you make that choice as well.

Strategy 5: Visualize the options. Imagine, as vividly as you can, what life will be like if you choose each of the possible options. Try to make these visualizations as realistic as possible, gathering whatever information you can to make them realistic. Make sure these visualizations cover both the good and bad aspects of each choice. Spend more time focussing on the aspects of the options that will occur the most, since these tend to have a much greater impact on how good or bad a situation is overall. For instance, if you’re thinking about taking a job that is likely to be boring, don’t just visualize this boredom for a second and move on. Repeatedly imagine being bored sitting at your desk, since it is likely to be a major component of the experience, occurring a significance percentage of your days.  Once you’ve completed your visualizations, see which of the options you feel the best about. If there are some major points of uncertainty about what the options will be like, and these points of uncertainty would greatly influence how you feel about the options, visualize each possibility for each option, and write down a score from 1 to 10 representing how good you feel about it. Multiply each of these scores by how likely you estimate that possibility is to occur, and sum up these for each option to produce a total score for how good the option is.

Strategy 6: Persuade yourself with an essay. In important cases where there are only two options, try writing a 400 word essay as to why you should pick the first option rather than the second. Once that is done, write a 400 word essay about why you should choose the second option rather than the first. Read both of these over. This writing process can help you flesh out your thoughts, analyze the situation more completely, and discover more about how you feel about the various options.

Strategy 7: Poll good decision makers. Think of three or four people who are unusually good decision makers, and unusually careful at thinking through challenging problems. Now, explain to each of them the details of your situation, and ask what they think you should do in the circumstance. If they all agree with each other, that may be a compelling justification for going with their preferred option.

How can you choose between these seven methods? Well, if it’s a decision where you think emotion might be clouding your judgement, try thinking about the advice you would give a friend. If it’s a decision where there are many factors to consider, go ahead and list the pros and cons. If after doing that you still don’t know which option is better, do a full cost benefit analysis. If it’s a scenario where you can gather data about others who have made the same choices, try that. If you’d prefer to make an intuitive judgement over using a point system, go ahead and visualize the options. For decisions with just two options where you’re having trouble getting yourself to analyze the problem carefully, try to persuade yourself with an essay. If you know some careful thinkers who would be happy to try to help, then go ahead and poll good decision makers.

While there isn’t a single right answer as to how to approach making important, complex decisions, these strategies can help you formalize the process and avoid pitfalls, boosting the chance that you select the option that’s best overall.

These circumstances can be explained, at least partially, in terms of desires changing and conflicting with each other. What we want when we consciously reflect on a situation sometimes differs from what we want when we are actually in that situation. And our desires can oppose each other, either simultaneously, or at different times. Desires push our actions in one direction for a while, only to push them in the opposite direction later on.

Tourette Syndrome can provide a particularly striking example of simultaneously wanting and not wanting. A small fraction of people with this syndrome have an extremely strong urge to yell obscenities (which apparently can feel almost like the desire to scratch an itch). In some cases they are able to learn to hold off the impulse (for instance when the social context makes it particularly inappropriate), but the desire to curse may still win out a few seconds later. The conscious desire not to offend people by cursing is at war with another, very powerful desire.

Let’s consider the case of a woman who eats excessively and hates this about herself. When she’s full, but good tasting food is sitting in front of her, does she actually want to keep eating? When she thinks about it consciously she probably experiences a strong feeling of “not wanting” associated with the idea of eating large quantities. At the same time, when she looks at the food, there is likely an intense desire to keep consuming it. She also may have habits which promote overeating: going to restaurants that serve large portions, selecting foods with high calorie density, eating quickly, eating the entire amount on her plate, eating while distracted by other activities, and so forth.

If we consider the fact that desires change from moment to moment and can come into conflict with each other, it is not hard to see why people get stuck in loops of oscillating desires. You don’t want to do X when you reflect on it, then end up doing X anyway because a new desire arises at the moment of action, then you regret it afterwards when you reflect further. This cycle can repeat for months or years.

Let’s again consider the case of the woman who overeats. Her experience might be as follows. When reflecting consciously, she doesn’t want to overeat, but when food is in front of her, a new desire springs to life. The desire to eat more is now suddenly greater than the reflective desire to not overeat, so she eats too much. In fact, if she is not actively thinking about her desire to not be someone who overeats, that desire to eat less may not be engaged at all. And if she is consciously reflecting at the time, she may start to make excuses for herself, such as “I’ll eat whatever I want now, and just eat less tomorrow to make up for it.” Afterwards, the desire to eat has diminished or disappeared, so when she consciously reflects again she regrets the fact that she eat too much and vows not to do it again. Then the entire pattern repeats because the vow is not enough to make her reflective desire win out over those momentary urges to eat.

Why is it that at times your conscious, reflective desires beat out your momentary desires, and other times they get trumped? A variety of factors likely affect the outcome, including:

• The relative “strengths” of the two desires
• Your present mental state (including level of hunger, fatigue, discomfort, emotional arousal, and so forth)
• The frequency with which you engages in conscious reflection, and whether you happen to apply it during the current situation
• Your propensity towards delaying gratification
• The number of times (and how recently) you let this momentary desire trump your reflective desire (i.e. the strength of the habits you’ve formed)
• Your overall ability to override impulses with conscious thought

Why do our actions conflict with our conscious desires in the first place? It’s a necessary consequence of the fact that many different forces compel us to act. These forces include:

• Primal drives. We yearn for food, sex, social status, etc.
• Emotional responses. We want to avoid situations that makes us anxious, and attack people that make us angry.
• Instinctual and automatic responses. We pull our hand away from a hot stove, turn to look when a loud noise occurs, and scratch our skin when it itches.
• Habit. When we’ve taken the same route to work twenty times in a row, we continue taking that route without even thinking about it.
• Conscious reflection. We may long for a world where people don’t starve, and so volunteer at a non-profit organization, or want to be a person who exercises more often, and so buy a gym membership.

Our conscious reflections about what we want can conflict with each of these forces, and with each other. For instance:

• You want to think of yourself as a good person who doesn’t steal but also want to download music files without paying for them.
• You don’t want to cheat on your girlfriend, but you feel strongly attracted to a particular woman.
• You want to make more friends, but it stresses you out being in social situations with new people.
• You want to be a great boxer, but you flinch whenever your opponent feints a punch.
• You want to walk with better posture, but you keep falling into your habit of slouching.

What can we do when we find ourselves stuck in a loop where we don’t want to do X, then do X anyway due to momentary desires, then regret it? In other words, how do we get our actions to more closely align with what our conscious, reflective mind wants? Here are some techniques that can be useful:

• Social reinforcement. Tell someone else how you want to act, and get them to check on you regularly to make sure that you act that way. This can be especially effective if you have a strong desire not to let this person down. This creates a secondary desire (pleasing another person) that works in the same direction as your conscious, reflective desire.
• Avoid acting while in fragile mental states. When you’re feeling tired, uncomfortable, hungry, stressed, or emotional try to avoid those situations where your conscious mind will need to override strong conflicting desires. In these delicate states it may be harder to get your thinking to control your actions.
• Activate your conscious mind more often. The more frequently you can get yourself to engage your conscious mind during an action and reflect on what you value and why you value it, the better chance you’ll have of overriding momentary desires that come up. One strategy is as follows: If there are times when you expect to experience strong momentary desires, you can setup phone alerts/reminders to snap you into a conscious state. For instance, if you’re going to a business meeting at a restaurant where the wine will be flowing, and you’re worried you might drink too much, set your phone to vibrate with a message ten minutes into the dinner to remind your conscious mind that you shouldn’t have more than a glass or two. You might even include in the phone reminder the reasons why drinking more would be a bad idea (to increase your motivation).
• Positive reinforcement. Reward yourself for acting in ways that are in closer alignment to what your conscious mind values. To boost effectiveness, try to make these rewards come as quickly as possible after you do your good behavior. For instance, if you know that you should get to work right away every morning, but have trouble doing so, take that first sip of delicious morning coffee right when you sit down to begin you’re work (and don’t let yourself drink any before then).
• Break old habits. During times when your conscious mind happens to be in particularly strong control, start to break bad habits by putting yourself in the situation where your momentary desires typically take over, and purposely override them. So, if you’re feeling powerful, go to the store that sells those amazing cupcakes you usually can’t resist. Look at one closely, take a whiff of its delicious smell, and feel yourself salivating. Now walk out without buying one!
• Build new habits. Sometimes undesirable habits can be subverted without fighting them directly by simply forming new habits to replace them. If you’re accustomed to spending two hours watching TV every night starting at 8pm, and this is something you don’t like about yourself, try to create a habit of sitting down to read a useful book at 7:45pm. After you’ve done this for enough nights in a row you will have replaced your watching habit with a reading one, and it will no longer be difficult to avoid watching two hours of TV a night .

Our actions can substantially deviate from what our conscious, reflective desires imply we should do. But our conscious mind doesn’t have to take this lying down. By planning ahead, and applying techniques like those mentioned, you can give your conscious desires an improved chance of trumping competing forces that compel you to act. While your conscious mind is in control, you can make arrangements to handle situations where it most likely won’t be.

It could be the case that we almost always act for good reasons, and that our explanations accurately reflect these reasons. But let’s consider an alternative hypotheses. Let’s suppose that much of our decision-making is influenced by factors that seem like they should be irrelevant, but that affect us below the level of conscious awareness. In that case, our attempts to explain our own behavior would often be incomplete. We would attribute our decision to X, when in fact Y and Z were also factors, perhaps as important as X. But, since we would be unaware of Y and Z, it might seem to us like our explanation X was complete.

So how could one test this hypothesis, that people are frequently influenced by factors which they don’t notice are altering their decisions? One approach is as follows. Randomly divide a population of people into two groups, A and B, of roughly equal size. Put everyone from both groups into nearly identical situations, with the only difference being that the experience of people in A differs in a single respect from the experience of those in group B. Choose this difference to be one that participants are unlikely to believe could have a significant chance of changing their behavior, but which you as a researcher think could in fact alter behavior in a specific way. Now see if the behavior of people in group A differs strongly in the predicted way from the behavior of those in B. If it does, this is evidence that we sometimes act for reasons that we don’t understand, and that our self reports of why we act may be inaccurate or incomplete.

Many studies of this basic format have been conducted, some with quite disturbing results. Consider the following scenarios:

• An ordinary looking man comes up to you on the street and asks you for a dime. Take a moment to think of what factors would influence your decision as to whether to give him the money. Would you be influenced by how he is dressed? By whether he smiles? What behaviors could this person do to make it much more likely that you would comply?
• A stranger asks you on a date, or asks you to dance at a club. Presumably your decision of whether to agree might depend on how good-looking you think the person is. But what other, subtler factors, might influence your decision?

It turns out that a powerfully influential factor in these cases is whether the person gives you a brief touch on the upper arm when making their request. As Richard Wiseman notes in his book 59 seconds, researchers have consistently found effects from physical contact. In one such study, a person asking for a dime was 20% more likely to get the money when they asked with a quick touch than without. In another study, 1.5 times more women accepted an offer to dance when a touch was used than when it wasn’t (with the acceptance rate jumping from 43% to 65%). A third study found that when attractive men asked out women on the street, their success rate doubled from 10% to 20% when they used a brief touch. People would never say “I decided to go out with him because he touched me on the arm”, and yet, it seems that about half of the women in the “touch group” of this latter study would in fact not have accepted the date without that momentary touch. Presumably, few if any of the women realized this.

Another fertile source of insight into decision-making is the book Yes!, on the tactics of persuasion. Consider these scenarios:

• You are staying in a hotel and find a note that asks you to reuse your towels (as opposed to leaving them to be cleaned) in order to help protect the environment. You’d expect your level of devotion to environmental causes to influence whether you comply. But could it be the case that an alteration to the note could make your compliance much more likely? In one study, it was found that simply mentioning that the majority of people who stayed in your hotel room followed the request caused a 33% increase in people reusing towels. Yet, if these hotel guests were asked why they agreed to reuse their towels, it seems unlikely that many would say it was because other people did it too. We often subconsciously take cues from others which influence how we act.
• You get a phone call one day from a group conducting a study for a “public service publication”, and they would like you to participate. The person on the phone says that participation will involve “five or six men from our staff coming into your home some morning for about 2 hours to enumerate and classify all the household products that you have.” What simple trick could this organization use to substantially increase the chance that you will say yes? It was found that when homeowners were called three days before this request in order to give them a phone interview about their product use for the same publication, they were 2.4 times more likely to agree to the later, much more invasive request. Those who didn’t receive an earlier call agreed to allow the surveying men to come 22% of the time, compared to 53% of those who did receive an advance call. And yet, it seems unlikely that those people whose behavior was altered by the non-invasive phone survey would be aware that it was an essential ingredient in their decision. Agreeing to do something small can unwittingly make us far more willing to do a similar but much larger thing later on.
• You receive a survey in the mail, sent by a stranger, along with a typed request that you complete it. Presumably, if you find the survey topic interesting, you may be more likely to do so. But regardless of your interest level, what variable could the sender change to make you much more likely to fill it out? In one study it was found that if a handwritten sticky note was attached that requested the survey be completed, the chance that the survey was returned was more than doubled, from 36% to 75%. The slight increase in effort and personal touch of attaching a hand written sticky note made people substantially more likely to want to help out.

Do these sorts of effects only hold on unimportant choices? Let’s consider some decisions where money or lives are at stake.

• You are interviewing college students for a job. Presumably you will take into account their quantity of work experience and grade point average. And yet, in one study, total months of work experience and grade point average did not have a statistically significant effect on whether candidates were offered a job. What did have a significant positive effect was whether the candidates tried to ingratiate themselves with the interviewer (e.g. by conforming to the interviewers opinions and offering favors). We naturally want to hire people that we feel positively towards, even when we believe ourselves to be evaluating them on objective criteria.
• You want to buy a subscription to the economist. You can choose the web only version for $59, or for $125 get the print version which also includes web access. Which would you select, and why? Surely after the fact you would be able to explain why one would be more right for you than the other. But as Dan Ariely discusses in his book Predictably Irrational, when he conducted a study on this scenario he found that adding a third subscription option which nobody selected massively altered people’s behavior. If a $125 print only version is included as an option, which is similar to the $125 print-and-web option but strictly worse, the preferences of subjects switched from 32% favoring the print-and-web version to a whopping 84% preferring it. The latter group thought they were choosing for good reasons, but in fact many of them changed their minds due merely to the decoy option being offered. The decoy option was clearly worse than the print-and-web version, therefore making the latter look more compelling positive on a relative basis, even though no one wanted the decoy.
• It is your job to determine how many years someone should go to jail for illegally entering her neighbors apartment and stealing money and merchandise. Your judgement will be based on a description of the crime, as well as a photo of the criminal and routine demographic information about her. What factors do you think will alter your decision of how long a sentence you’d apply? When such a study was conducted on undergraduate students, it was found that when the photograph of the criminal was switched from an attractive woman to a substantially less attractive woman, the average prison sentence that the students assigned increased by a factor of 1.9, from 2.8 years in jail to 5.2 years. The average sentence that the less attractive photo produced was about equal to that of a control that was identical except that it included no photograph. Beauty and ugliness can substantially distort our perceptions of other people, even with regard to traits that have nothing to do with a person’s looks.
• You’re again given the task of determining the sentence that an accused criminal should receive based on details about their case. You’re also given the prosecutor’s sentencing demand, but you know this demand is random, because you determined it yourself by rolling a pair of dice and summing the values. Surely, the sentencing demand wouldn’t influence the sentence you would give. Right? In one such study, the sentences that lawyers gave in such a scenario were almost 1.5 times higher when their dice came up with high values than when the dice had low ones (the mean sentence rising from 5.3 months to 7.8 months). The values we assign to things can be substantially influenced by suggested “anchors”, even when we know intellectually that those anchors are irrelevant.
• You’re filling out a form and have the option to sign up as an organ donor. One might imagine that your sense of obligation to other people might come into play. But could the way the form is written have a large impact on this weighty decision? In one study, when people were presented with opt-out organ donation forms (or ones where a choice was forced) people said they would be willing to donate their organs at twice as high a rate compared to if they were presented with an opt-in form. Furthermore, it was found that out of a sample of 11 countries, all 4 countries that use an opt-in organ donation procedure had organ donation rates lower than all 7 countries with opt-out procedures. Yet, it seems unlikely that many people attribute their organ donation choices to whether or not they had to check a box. Sometimes the default or “standard” choice, can have a powerful effect on what we decide.

These studies, and the many others like them, raise serious questions about the extent to which we understand why we make the choices that we do. Seemingly irrelevant or unimportant information seems to powerfully alter our behavior in a wide variety of circumstances. Those influences that are subconscious are particularly pernicious, because their very nature prevents us from noticing how they affect us.

So the next time you think you know why you made a decision, don’t be so sure that the story you tell after is the actual story.