Agency and decision making: making the right decisions, and making your decisions right
Decision making often starts from the assumption that people are trying to make optimal choices. But there’s a subtlety here; some people are trying to make optimal choices given their limitations, and some people are trying to satisfice.
(A lot of the debate about whether humans are rational - Stein, Stanovich, Gigerenzer - depends on how you define rationality and optimal choices. “Humans don’t make optimal choices - so they’re irrational!” “On the other hand, they’re ecologically rational, or (rationally) satisficing rather than optimising, or optimising given natural constraints . . .”)
Most people don’t start by making optimal choices simpliciter; they make a choice and then do their best to make it optimal (and normally end up with some satisficed alternative). The Promised Neverland, Chapter 109 makes this point quite sharply:
Trying to make the correct decision is important, but that alone isn't all there is to it.
In the moment, nobody can know what the correct or incorrect decision is going to be. But what's important are the decisions you make afterwards, and the effort you put in to make that decision correct.
Even if the judgement you made finished in a bad result, what can you do from there? In what way can you still fight for what's important to you?
If it was decided by judgement alone, life would be a real gamble. Have faith in your judgement. And no matter what that results in, move forward.
Alternative translation from MS:
It's not your fault. Of course, it's very important to try your hardest to decide the best alternative, but that's not the be-all and end-all of it.
No one in the world can know in advance which choice will be the best. That's impossible. The point is what comes after . . . and making the best out of your choice. If the path you've chosen brings about something bad, that's all the more reason for you to work even harder to find out how to proceed.
If you just focus on plans and predictions, you'll end up playing games with people's lives. Stand by your choices. Take responsibility for them. Whatever happens, keep moving on.
It’s interesting how these discussions of agency are framed. In The Promised Neverland, the affirmation of agency is preceded by saying “It’s not your fault.” A similar situation happens in Good Will Hunting: Will has to realise that many parts of his life were not his fault before he can move on. Agency is more easily exercised after the past has been renounced - starting with a clean slate, as it were.
A similar sentiment is expressed by saying, “Imagine that today is the first day you exist/that your consciousness is inhabiting your body for the first time. What would you change?” The point of this question is to remove path dependence and sunk cost fallacies, and to allow people to make decisions in a new light.
Andrew Solomon makes a similar point in a 2014 talk [video and transcript]:
My last book was about how families manage to deal with various kinds of challenging or unusual offspring. And one of the mothers I interviewed, who had two children with multiple severe disabilities, said to me, “People always give us these little sayings like, ‘God doesn't give you any more than you can handle.’ But children like ours are not preordained as a gift. They're a gift because that's what we have chosen.” We make those choices all our lives. . .
Forging meaning and building identity does not make what was wrong right. It only makes what was wrong precious.
As I enjoyed his talk, I will quote some other portions:
We don't seek the painful experiences that hew our identities, but we seek our identities in the wake of painful experiences. We cannot bear a pointless torment, but we can endure great pain if we believe that it's purposeful. Ease makes less of an impression on us than struggle. We could have been ourselves without our delights, but not without the misfortunes that drive our search for meaning. . .
I would have had an easier life if I were straight, but I would not be me. And I now like being myself better than the idea of being someone else, someone who, to be honest, I have neither the option of being nor the ability fully to imagine. But if you banish the dragons, you banish the heroes, and we become attached to the heroic strain in our own lives. . .
I tend to find the ecstasy hidden in ordinary joys, because I did not expect those joys to be ordinary to me. . . All those earlier experiences were what had propelled me to this moment, and I was finally unconditionally grateful for a life I'd once have done anything to change.
