Why Is Change So Hard?

How many decisions would you guess that you make in a given day? Take a second, mentally walk through your day and hazard a guess. Most people I ask this question land somewhere around 100, which is way off – try 35,000.

That’s right, you make 35,000 decisions per day.

Canonical models of decision-making deal with two types of decisions – certain (i.e., with a known set of alternatives with certain outcomes) and uncertain (just the opposite). In theory, decisions made under conditions of certainty involve ranking the known alternatives and choosing the most preferred option, simple enough.

Uncertain decisions operate from a similar theory, with the only kink being that subjective probabilities are assigned to the different outcome likelihoods. Thus, decision makers weigh the desirability of a given option by the chance that it will or won’t occur. These are nice ideas and make a certain amount of sense until you consider the sheer volume of decisions we make each day.

When you consider that you make 12,775,000 decisions each year, thinking that each determination is made by weighing its probabilistic utility starts to strain credulity. If making that many decisions sounds exhausting, the research supports that it is, which leads us to disproportionately stick with the familiar.