Scientists know why we are so indecisive — and how to get over it

When you make a decision, you try to control the future. If you take a new job in a new city, you also try to move toward a vision of a potentially better you. The same applies to other life-changing choices, like whether or not to have kids. Deciding to turn what-ifs into reality is what propels your story forward.

But the hard truth is that study after study shows humans are not great decision-makers. We restrict life’s possibilities to a narrow subset of choices; we tend to omit some of the most important objectives, and we’re not good at estimating the probability of certain outcomes.

“People are generally quite bad at perceiving and using probability information,” says Katherine Fox-Glassman, a psychology professor at Columbia University who studies decision-making.

“Our brains are really well suited to so many things — understanding uncertainty is not one of those things for most people,” Fox-Glassman tells me. “People misinterpret, distort, ignore, and misuse probability in dozens of well-documented ways.”

Fox-Glassman’s students often tell her they’re excited to take her class because they want to learn to make better decisions. By the time the semester ends, they tend to report that they didn’t achieve their original goal — but they do pay more attention to how they make their choices.