Decision-making in multiple contexts, as told by Herodotus in The Histories
[Herodotus on the Persians in The Histories]
Some of you who have talked to me recently on making decisions may know that I tend to talk about making decisions in multiple contexts. The idea is that if you make a decision once, you're assuming every fruit of that decision is going to be consumed in the exact same context in the future. This is absurd, of course. Ideally, in order to effectively avoid regret, you'd be able to consider the outcomes of a decision in every context you might experience those outcomes in the future. This is of course impossible, but the idea is to experience as many of then as you can as you think about your choices. Let's say you're considering whether to take a job across the country; the strategy would be to consider the proposition when excited, when depressed, when frustrated, when scared about the future, when glowing from positive feedback, and so on. The relevant cognitive bias here is probably an iteration of the availability heuristic, in the sense that we tend to believe the way we feel right now is how we'll feel forever.
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cognitive fallacies
decisionmaking
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