I'm chronically bad at making decisions. Not that I usually make bad ones; actually, most of them end up being pretty good. But whether the decision is big or small, buying a house or choosing from a restaurant menu, I agonize over each decision and often experience second thoughts as soon as it is made. Porter tells an old joke about a man ordering dessert: The waitress informs him that they are offering apple pie and cherry pie, and after considering the matter for a while, he chooses the apple. A few minutes later she returns to his table and say, "I'm sorry, sir, I forgot to tell you we also have coconut cream pie." "Oh!" the diner exclaims, "In that case I'll have the cherry."
The point of the joke is the man's irrational behavior in changing his mind after the addition of irrelevant information, but I understand him completely. Coconut cream pie has nothing to do with it. He couldn't decide between apple and cherry, and when he finally closed the door on the cherry pie, it suddenly seemed the more attractive. The waitress's return gave him a chance to change his decision.
With that in mind, you can see why I was attracted by the headline of a New York Times article by John Tierney called The Advantages of Closing a Few Doors. It seems I'm not the only one who likes to keep her options open: In a series of experiments, MIT students playing a game chose to take what amounted to a 15% penalty in their earnings (cold, hard cash) in order to keep unnecessary doors from closing.
The researcher, Dan Ariely, is a professor of behavioral economics at MIT, and at his website, Predictably Irrational, you can find not only this game but others, and much more on the subject of how we often act contrary to our own best interests. I'm sure some of his experiments violate a research code of ethics somewhere, such as the experiment in which male college students were asked questions about sexual behavior before and after viewing Internet porn sites. Nonetheless, even that research revealed some unexpected and frightening results. Ariely has a book by the same name, which I would order from the library if I didn't already have a backlog of five library books pining away in the not-ready-to-be-returned state.
