We all go through our everyday life making a lot of decisions. They can be as small as choosing tea or coffee or a big one such as a choice of career. We all want to make sure we choose the right path.
However, there are instances where we make the wrong decisions repeatedly and are frustrated with ourselves. Fear not and read on to find the reasons why the brain ends up walking down the wrong path.
1.Blame it on stress
For the human brain, the stress of making the right decision can be counterproductive to the decision-making process. Fear of choosing wrong is hard-wired into the brain. The bigger the decision the more likely is the person to make mistakes.
What stress does is that it increases the activity in the medial orbitofrontal region, the anterior cingulate cortex and the hippocampus. These areas control emotions. When faced with a very important decision, the stress hormones amp up the activity in this area leading to emotional stress and results in an inability to think clearly.
2. All’s well that ends well
The human brain is programmed to remember and learn from a past incident based on the way it ended. A bad experience with a pleasant ending will be forgotten and good experience with an unpleasant unending will be remembered. Thus, the brain is effectively sabotaging its own efforts to learn from past mistakes.
3. We all follow someone
The oft-repeated adage “Man is known by the company he keeps” is true in case of faulty decisions. Psychologists state that a person is more likely to follow the advice of someone he knows, even if the advice isn’t logical or helpful.
4. Harvey Dent chose well
Lastly, did you know that having too many options can also cause you to make an error in judgment? This is tied up with the previous point, where the brain, faced with too many options and too many choices, overheats and loses its capacity to analyze the options separately. Now you know, why you get stressed out over where to eat dinner on a Saturday night.
