The Daily Indecisiveness
Khe Nguyen
“What is for dinner?” or “Which shampoo should I pick?” are supposed to be easy trivial questions, except they are universally proven to be unexpectedly hard. In today's world of unlimited options promoted by overconsumption, alongside 35,000 conscious choices that an average adult needs to make every day, there is a psychological heaviness to decision making. If the choice isn’t perfect, it’s easy to imagine that you could have made a different choice for a better result. This puts pressure on even the most insignificant daily decisions.
Understanding the factors that influence unexpectedly hard choices in a world of unlimited possibilities is important to understanding what decisions are being made. For my thesis, I inspect the factors of hard choices through The Daily Indecisiveness, a series of four informational and interactive digital explorations to understand behavioral science of decision making by visualizing common patterns that influence hard choices.
The first, Choice Overload, inspects the amount of options offered and whether more options help or hinder decision making. The second, Satisficers vs Maximizers, reveals your decision making style and how it contributes to indecisiveness. The third exploration, Hard Choice, considers the consequence of choice and if knowledge of consequence makes the decision easier. Finally, Regret of Inaction asks people to reflect on the past regret of action and inaction to find a pattern in decision making.