9780131425019

"Stephen P. Robbins identifies the major roadblocks that stand in the way of making high-quality decisions - and shows you exactly how to overcome them. You'll discover what you can't learn from experience ... when to settle for a "good enough" decision ... why your instincts can lead you astray ... the surprising ways your personality shapes your decision making ... how to avoid "hearing what you want to hear" ... and why you might be seeing patterns that aren't there."--BOOK JACKET.

Stephen P. Robbins currently a member of the faculty at San Diego State University.

Preface

xxi

Part 1 Introduction

1

(18)

Chapter 1 Decision Making Shapes Your Life

3

(4)

Chapter 2 The Search for Rationality

7

(4)

Chapter 3 Why It's Hard to Be Rational

11

(8)

Part 2 How Do You Make Decisions?

Chapter 4 What's Your Decision Style?

19

(4)

Chapter 5 Are You a Risk Taker?

23

(6)

Chapter 6 Who Controls Your Destiny?

29

(4)

Chapter 7 Do You Procrastinate?

33

(4)

Chapter 8 Are You Impulsive?

37

(4)

Chapter 9 Can You Control Your Emotions?

41

(4)

Chapter 10 Are You Overconfident?

45

(4)

Chapter 11 Understanding Your Personality Profile

49

(4)

Part 3 Common Biases and Errors That Most of Us Make (and How to Overcome Them)

53

(62)

Chapter 12 How Can You Be So Darn Sure About That? Coping with Overconfidence

55

(6)

Chapter 13 Never Do Today That Which You Can Do Tomorrow: The Inertia Bias

61

(4)

Chapter 14 I Want It, and I Want it NOW! The Immediate Gratification Bias

65

(4)

Chapter 15 Where You End Up Depends on Where You Start: The Anchoring Effect

69

(4)

Chapter 16 I'll See It When I Believe It: The Selective Perception Bias

73

(4)

Chapter 17 I Hear What I Want to Hear: The Confirmation Bias

77

(4)

Chapter 18 Is the Glass Half-Empty or Half-Full? The Framing Bias

81

(4)

Chapter 19 What Have You Done for Me Lately? The Availability Bias

85

(4)

Chapter 20 Looks Can Be Deceiving: The Representation Bias

89

(4)

Chapter 21 Seeing Patterns That Aren't There: Coping with Randomness

93

(4)

Chapter 22 Gone Is Not Always Forgotten: Understanding Sunk Costs

97

(4)

Chapter 23 Keep It Simple: The Limited Search Error

101

(6)

Chapter 24 Losing Your Head in the Heat of Battle: The Emotional Involvement Error

107

(4)

Chapter 25 Who You Gonna Blame? The Self-Serving Bias

111

(4)

Chapter 26 I Knew It All The Time: The Hindsight Bias

115

(1)

Part 4 Advice Your Mother Never Gave You

115

(46)

Chapter 27 Clear Goals and Preferences Make Choosing a Lot Easier

121

(4)

Chapter 28 Choosing not to Decide Is Still a Decision

125

(4)

Chapter 29 Decisions Are Not Made in Isolation

129

(4)

Chapter 30 All Decisions Aren't Important

133

(4)

Chapter 31 More Information Isn't Necessarily Better

137

(4)

Chapter 32 Don't Rehash Past Decisions

141

(4)

Chapter 33 Successful People Take Risks

145

(4)

Chapter 34 It's OK to Make Mistakes, or no One Has an Undefeated Season

149

(4)

Chapter 35 Experience Can Improve Decisions, but...

153

(4)

Chapter 36 Where You're from Influences How You Decide

157

(4)

Part 5 An Epilogue

161

(10)

Chapter 37 Summary or why Ignorance Isn't Bliss

163

(8)

End Notes

171

What is included with this book?

The New copy of this book will include any supplemental materials advertised. Please check the title of the book to determine if it should include any access cards, study guides, lab manuals, CDs, etc.

The Used, Rental and eBook copies of this book are not guaranteed to include any supplemental materials. Typically, only the book itself is included. This is true even if the title states it includes any access cards, study guides, lab manuals, CDs, etc.

Few issues so widely affect our daily lives as dramatically as does the quality of our decisions. How much you earn, your health status, your relationships, and your overall level of happiness are just a sampling of outcomes that are largely due to decisions you''ve made. In spite of the importance of making good decisions, few of us have had any formal training in the process. You couldn''t graduate from high school without classes in English, math, science, government, and history, but did you have any courses in decision making? Probably not. If you want to be good at cooking, you take courses in cooking. The same is true for drawing, doing financial analysis, or healing the sick. Most of us even took a formal class in typing to develop our proficiency for such a mundane task as key-boarding. But, for some reason, it''s just assumed that, through practice and experience, all of us can learn to be good decision makers. A little observation tells us rather quickly that everyone doesn''t make good decisions. Apparently, practice and experience aren''t very good teachers of this skill. I, for one, continue to be amazed at the bad decisions some people make. They buy stocks at their peak prices and sell them when they''re near their lows. They play slot machines and bet on other games of chance as if there is such a thing as a "hot streak," or they marry a person that they know is wrong for them. (For evidence on this last point, watch some of the daytime talk shows and listen to guests contrive explanations for staying with partners who continually lie and cheat on them.) We know a great deal about how people make decisions and how to improve the process. Unfortunately, this knowledge is not widespread. The purpose ofDecide & Conqueris to change that. Drawing on thousands of research studies, this book translates what experts know about behavioral decision processes into layman terms with heavy emphasis on application. I wrote this book as an everyman''s guide on how to improve the choices that shape our lives, and, after reading this book, you will have the tools to make better decisions. What qualifies me to write this book? I''ve been researching and writing about organizational decision making for nearly 30 years. My textbook on organizational behavior, for instance, is now in its 10th edition and has been read by more than a million students. The behavioral decision-making literature is a fundamental component in understanding organizational behavior. I wroteDecide & Conquerbecause I thought I could bring my "translating" skills to the behavioral decision-making literature and make this literature more accessible to people with a nontechnical background. Keep in mind that giving you the tools to make better decisions is not the same as helping you to make the right decisions. This book is designed to show you the right way to structure and analyze problems. It focuses on the process you use to arrive at your decisions. That''s because a good decision should be judged by the process used, not the results achieved. In some cases, a "good decision" results in an undesirable outcome. If you used the right process, however, you will have made a good decision regardless of the outcome. So I can''t tell you what to decide, but I can show you how to decide. Unfortunately, because chance events influence outcomes, there can be no assurances that using the right process will result in a desirable outcome, but it does increase that probability. This book has been organized into five parts. Part I argues that decision making permeates everything we do and that all of us need to know the right way to make decisions. Part II proposes that improving your decision making begins by understanding your personality traits and how they shape your decision-making preferences. Part III describes, in detail, biases and shortcuts that many of us use that hinder our decision-making effectiveness. Part IV describes a number of insights that can help you improve your decision making. Part V is a one-chapter brief summary of what you should have gotten out of reading this book. A book like this owes its existence to two distinct sets of contributors. First are those scholars who have studied the psychology of human judgment and decision making and have shared their research with us. The insights you''ll find in this book are the culmination of decades of research by hundreds of scholars such as Daniel Kahneman, Amos Tversky, Herbert A. Simon, Baruch Fischhoff, and Paul Slovic. My role here is similar to that played by television news anchors. TV news anchors don''t make the news; they just report it. Similarly, I didn''t "make" the findings you''ll read about in this book; I merely report them. My contribution was to review the thousands of studies that have been done on behavioral decision making and translate them into a form that can be easily understood and used. The second set of contributors are the people at my publisherFinancialTimes/Prentice Hall. Tim Moore, John Pierce, and Gary June believed in this project from its beginning and have provided me with terrific editorial and marketing support. Russ Hall provided feedback on how the manuscript could be improved, and Nicholas Radhuber was instrumental in managing the production process that turned my manuscript into the book you have in your hands. My thanks to each of you for making this book a reality. Stephen P. Robbins Seattle, Washington

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Decide and Conquer Make Winning Decisions and Take Control of Your Life

Decide and Conquer Make Winning Decisions and Take Control of Your Life

0131425013

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