Shahar Hechtlinger: The Psychology of Life's Most Important Decisions

Show Notes for Episode #3 of Unraveling Behavior

In this episode, I sit down with Shahar Hechtlinger, a PhD candidate in Psychology, to explore transformative life decisions—choices that can change who we are, such as becoming a parent, changing careers, or moving to a new country. We discuss how much decision-making research focuses on idealized models but lacks insights into how people actually make these life-altering choices. We examine why the expected utility model—a traditional way of thinking about rational decisions—does not really work for these situations, largely because the future is uncertain, and what matters to us can shift over time. Drawing on the work of philosopher L. A. Paul, we discuss how these experiences challenge conventional notions of rationality and require a different approach. Shahar Hechtlinger introduces a new conceptual framework from her research, offering simple strategies for navigating transformative life decisions, including imagining your ideal self, considering future regret, and taking incremental steps to manage irreversible choices. We also discuss findings from Shahar’s most recent study, showing that while people often rely on simpler strategies for themselves, they tend to recommend more complex approaches for others. This episode equips listeners with simple strategies and real-life examples to navigate transformative decisions, emphasizing the value of embracing uncertainty when facing life’s most significant choices.

Watch the interview on YouTube. Listen to the episode on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and other players, or subscribe via our RSS feed.

Links 

• Explore Shahar Hechtlinger’s work: Homepage, Google Scholar
• The article by Shahar Hechtlinger discussed in this episode
• Press release announcing the article
• Links to Laurie Paul's work: Book Transformative Experience by Laurie Paul, EconTalk podcast episode featuring Laurie Paul

Timestamps

• 01:03 Defining transformative life decisions and their significance
• 04:26 Differentiating between descriptive and normative approaches in decision-making research
• 06:21 Explaining the expected utility model and the challenge of uncertainty in decision outcomes
• 10:25 Laurie Paul’s distinction between epistemically and personally transformative experiences
• 14:16 Why transformative decisions conflict with the expected utility model
• 16:50 Is deciding to remain childless a transformative decision?
• 18:29 Key insights from Laurie Paul's appearance on the EconTalk podcast
• 19:25 Linking Laurie Paul’s insights to Shahar Hechtlinger’s descriptive approach to transformative decision making
• 21:03 Introducing a new conceptual framework for studying transformative life decisions
• 24:43 Choosing from the perspective of the current self versus the future self
• 28:00 The decision of Iranian athlete Saeid Mollaei to pursue his Olympic dream
• 29:06 The minimax inaction regret strategy, illustrated by Jeff Bezos
• 33:08 Minimizing irreversible consequences using the “testing the waters” strategy
• 36:16 Christine Blasey Ford’s gradual disclosure of her identity
• 38:44 Dealing with conflicting cues through a process of elimination
• 42:51 Overview of Shahar’s empirical study on transformative life decisions
• 45:36 The contrast between people’s use of simpler strategies and their recommendation of more complex ones
• 49:37 How research on transformative life decisions can empower decision makers

Transcript (edited)

Sofia Morais: When people hear the term transformative life decisions, they often think of choices that change who they are or alter the course of their lives. Is this also how you understand them?

Shahar Hechtlinger: Yes, absolutely. So this is, I think, a very easy way of understanding those decisions. Very intuitive. Of course, we identify them in different ways, but I think, for understanding what it is really that we talk about, this is a great way to do it. So those are decisions that often can really change what it is like to be a person—what it is like to be you. And they can manifest in very different areas of life. Sometimes, these can be things like moving to another country, making a big career change, or becoming a parent. But it can also be things that only some of us face sometime in life—things like reporting a sexual assault or rape, whistleblowing on an institution or a person. Really, anything that puts a person at the point of no return.

Sofia Morais: The consequences of these decisions don't need to be negative, right? They can also be transformative in positive ways.

Shahar Hechtlinger: Yes. The change can be perceived as positive, as negative, or most likely a little bit of both. So when we are facing a decision, often part of the reason why we are not sure is because some of the consequences can be good and some of them can be bad, and we are not sure how we will experience them. So this is a very important part of transformative decision making.

Sofia Morais: I can imagine that the circumstances that individuals find themselves in I s also an important variable here, right? The same decision can be transformative for one individual, but not for another, depending on their circumstances.

Shahar Hechtlinger: Yes, absolutely. The very same decision might not even be a decision for someone else. So, let’s take an example again—the example of becoming a parent. For many people, it’s not even a choice. In some countries, and for some individuals around the world, this is not really a choice: they become pregnant and have a child. But in more Western societies, we see this position of having a choice about it. And this is relatively new in history. This is one example. Or take the #MeToo movement. We talked about reporting assault or rape. This is also something relatively new and only became an option as history developed. When women didn’t even have the right to vote, let alone report sexual misconduct, it wasn’t even possible to imagine this decision. So, absolutely, it changes between people right now in the present, depending on their circumstances, and also across history.

Sofia Morais: In your PhD research, you're exploring how people make transformative life decisions. Could you give us a quick overview of what the scientific literature says about this so far.

Shahar Hechtlinger: So this can be very short: not much. We really don’t know much about this question. The emphasis here is on the “how” question. What we look at is what we call a descriptive question: we want to understand how people make decisions. This is different from a normative question, which asks how people should make decisions or how idealized agents should make decisions. This distinction is important because most of what we know about transformative life decisions comes from normative views—primarily from philosophy but also from cognitive science—that ask the normative question of how we should make these decisions. With regard to the descriptive question—how we do make these decisions—we really don’t know much. Most of what we know about how people make decisions, and we do know a lot, comes from studies that look at smaller decisions. For instance, some kind of experimental paradigm, like monetary gambles. We know really a lot about how people make decisions in those simplified scenarios. And we also know a bit about what people do outside the lab. But we really don’t know much about how people make those decisions that can transform them—their lives and themselves.

Sofia Morais: I suggest that we start by discussing the normative approach, since this is also where most work has been done in transformative decision making, and then transition into how this connects to your own descriptive work. According to theories of rational choice, decision makers should aspire to follow the expected utility model. Could you explain the key steps of this model?

Shahar Hechtlinger: Imagine that you are thinking about going on a picnic. You have a couple of options for how to act: you can go outside, or you can stay home. Let’s say you just have those two options. Now, there are also a couple of so-called states of the world that can occur. It might be a really nice day—very sunny—and hence, you would probably very much enjoy being outside on a picnic. But it might also rain, which would really not be nice because, you know, everything would get wet. And, of course, you can stay home, which is maybe the most well-known safe option. In the case of going on a picnic, you can check the weather forecast. You can assign some kind of probability to the events of rain or no rain—let’s put it like that. And because you’ve been on picnics before, you know more or less how much you are likely to enjoy it. So basically, let’s say you assign a number to indicate how happy you will be going on the picnic.

Sofia Morais: And that's the so-called utility.

Shahar Hechtlinger: That's the so-called utility. Exactly.

Sofia Morais: So, an indication of how much you think going on a picnic would contribute to your satisfaction—how much you would enjoy it?

Shahar Hechtlinger: Yes. I mean, utility can be many things. A lot has been written about what it is exactly, but let’s say it’s something like satisfaction, contribution to well-being, happiness—something like that. So, you assess for each state of the world—picnic with sun, picnic with rain, staying at home—how happy or satisfied you will be in each case. And let’s say you attach a number to it. Okay, so you have a set of numbers, and you have a set of probabilities indicating how likely those cases are. Then you multiply them. The option with the highest number—the highest expected utility—is what you will end up choosing if you are a rational agent, according to expected utility theory. Here, we are talking about subjective expected utility, where the agent themselves assigns the probabilities.

Sofia Morais: It is well known that this model has its limits as a tool for everyday decision-making. Even Savage, who was one of the main developers of this model, pointed out that we often don’t know all the outcomes of our decisions, or even how likely they are to occur. So, if you go on a picnic, for example, many other things can happen in addition to rainy or sunny weather. You could be stung by a wasp or lose your wallet.

Shahar Hechtlinger: But also, let’s not focus only on the bad. Some good things can happen, like finding yourself picnicking next to your favorite rock band. But the point is that those things that happen in real life are not accounted for in those very simplified models. Herbert Simon termed this “unanticipated consequences.”

Sofia Morais: In the case of transformative life decisions, things get even a little bit more complicated. Philosopher Laurie Paul has taken this a step further, arguing that these decisions pose an even greater challenge to the expected utility model. Could you explain why this is the case, perhaps using an example of a transformative life decision?

Shahar Hechtlinger: Yes, absolutely. I’m not sure if it’s a greater challenge, but it’s definitely a different kind of challenge that was not the focus of decision theory before. What Laurie Paul is saying is: Okay, we understand that sometimes we can’t know the consequences, but that’s part of the world. What was still assumed in those rational choice models is that we can always assign utilities. So we always know how happy, satisfied, or how much value we will derive from each option. What Laurie Paul is saying, which she developed in her very influential book Transformative Experience, is that some experiences, when we face choices about them, require us to think about many more things—not just the situation, but our own subjectivity. Some experiences, like becoming a parent—this is one of her canonical examples—are like this. When we think about them before undergoing the experience, we can spend a lot of time imagining what it would be like to become a parent. We can talk to people, we can do all sorts of things to inform ourselves about the experience. But what we can’t know is how the experience would feel for us, because we’ve never done anything like it before. Even if we’ve been babysitting or watching other people’s kids, nothing is really the same as having our own child. This is such a massive change that Laurie Paul claims it is an epistemically transformative experience. “Epistemically transformative” means that we cannot know how it feels to undergo the experience before actually experiencing it. And this is a kind of uncertainty or ignorance that was not accounted for in utility models. So, she’s saying this is one important aspect of those kinds of experiences. But, as we started with the intuition that the core of these decisions is personal transformation, right? This is what people think about when they think about these decisions. And this is the other part of Laurie Paul’s account of transformative experiences—personally transformative experiences. So, it’s not only that becoming a parent, for instance, changes what it is like to have the experience, it also changes us as a person. It can change us to the very core.

Sofia Morais: Like, your values?

Shahar Hechtlinger: By changing your values, it might be your personality, but mainly what you value as a person. So when you are at the point of choice, and you try to assign those utility values, you just don't know.

Sofia Morais: This brings us to this idea of mental simulation in Laurie Paul's work. So the idea, as I understand it, is that as a consequence of these experiences being epistemically and personally transformative, it is not possible for you today as a decision maker, to run this accurate simulation of yourself in the future, given that you have made a certain decision. Is this correct?

Shahar Hechtlinger: Yes. So basically, how the argument works is this: we have those transformative experiences, where we explain what is epistemically transformative and what is personally transformative. And we have the expected utility model. In Laurie Paul's argument, the reason why we cannot make rational decisions about transformative experiences, assuming that what is rational is expected utility theory, is because if we want to make those decisions by imagining what it would be like to undergo the experiences—which is often how people in the Western world think about it, like we should do things that we really want to do, and that we feel would be good for us—then, if this is how we want to make those decisions, simulating what it would be like to have the experience, like we did with the picnic or when choosing an ice cream, where we imagine, “Oh, would I like this or not like this?” This is a very intuitive way of thinking about preferential choice. So if this is how we want to make these decisions, and we are facing decisions about experiences that can change what it’s like to be us, and we don’t know how they would feel, then it’s really in this area that we cannot do it. Of course, all the limitations we mentioned before from Savage and Simon also apply here. This is important to note. It’s just an additional challenge that Laurie Paul has pointed out, which was not acknowledged before.

Sofia Morais: Now, let's take the case of a person that decides to remain childless. Can this still be considered a transformative decision?

Shahar Hechtlinger: So, in our view, yes. The moment of decision-making happens before any transformation. And if you consider transformation, this is already a transformative decision. So, a transformative experience doesn’t have to occur in order for the decision to be considered transformative. Okay? So, this is how we see it. And this is also why our focus is on the decision-making part and not on the experiencing part, because a lot of things can happen after you make your decision, right? There’s a lot of uncertainty. What you thought might happen might not happen. Partly because of the transformation, both personal and epistemic. So, it can go both ways. Decisions can transform you more than you thought they would, but they can also transform you less than you thought they would. What really counts, in our view, is the moment of, or the period of, making the choice—the consideration of something that is transformative. And if someone chose to remain childless after considering whether or not to remain childless, or whether to become a parent, then this would still be a transformative decision.

Sofia Morais: I'd like to share some quotes from Laurie Paul's appearance in the EconTalk podcast to help connect her insights to your own work. Is that okay?

Shahar Hechtlinger: Of course! I always love hearing from Laurie.

Sofia Morais: She said, “I want us to recognize what we can do and what we can't do. What we can know and what we can't know. Not set ourselves impossible tasks. So take a stance involving epistemic humility. And then from that stance, look at what kinds of decision models we might be able to build.” She also said, “My hope is that we do a better job at recognizing the challenges that we face and then expand our research and our thinking so that we can try to handle them.” How do you see these insights connecting to your own research?

Shahar Hechtlinger: I really love this quote. I think it’s a great way to bridge Laurie Paul’s work, the emphasis on a more normative understanding of transformative life decisions, and the question of how people actually make them. So, what we basically understand from Paul’s work is that it’s impossible to... If we want to use some kind of mental simulation to make decisions about transformative experiences, it’s impossible to do so. But then there’s still the question: how do we do it? Right? Because a lot of people actually make these decisions in real life. This is where our work starts. We say, okay, this doesn’t work in the classical norms of utility theory, but people still make these decisions all the time. So, how do they make them? And maybe we need to change our view on what rationality means in order to understand them. Because maybe people can make these decisions rationally, but rationality would not mean exactly the same thing as it does in expected utility theory. As we said before, we know quite a lot about how people make decisions—maybe not the biggest decisions, but as we mentioned, there is uncertainty everywhere. Even in smaller decisions, there’s uncertainty. So, our approach goes in this direction and is based on a very long history of research on strategies that can work in many different decision situations. We basically take this approach and adapt it to transformative life decisions. We identify what is unique, or what the key characteristics are, of transformative life decisions. Then, according to those characteristics, we identify a set of strategies that address those situational characteristics.

Sofia Morais: This brings us to the conceptual framework that you propose in an article you coauthored with Christin Schulze, Christina Leuker, and Ralph Hertwig, which was just very recently published in the journal American Psychologist. This framework has, say, three main steps, as you were saying, right? First, you identify the properties, the characteristics of the decision situation, and then you use these properties to sort of generate hypotheses about what strategies people might apply in those situations. What about this text-based approach that you used to document and find examples of strategies?

Shahar Hechtlinger: You can imagine it’s quite hard to take transformative life decisions and put them in a lab setting, like you study monetary gambles, for instance. Inherent to our approach, even when it's conceptual (since we still don’t present our own empirical data in this paper), is that we’ve already thought a lot about how one can go about studying these decisions. Because this is the point—maybe the main motivation behind this paper—to sort of set the groundwork to be able to study these decisions. Since all of us are making these decisions and they are very important to us, they are not just things that we do and forget about. We can find traces of transformative life decisions in culture. So, when we look at printed books, blog posts, or news articles, they’re all over. They’re really all over.

Sofia Morais: So traces of the decision-making process that people used.

Shahar Hechtlinger: Yes, both the approach they used, but also the dimensions of those big life decisions.

Sofia Morais: Like the challenges they faced.

Shahar Hechtlinger: Exactly. So, this is quite a rich array of descriptions of both the decision situation, which is the first thing we were interested in, right, and also of how people addressed them. So, what did they do? What did they think about? When we say "text-based approach," we’re basically saying that we had a very deep look at sources like the ones I mentioned. We really read a lot and picked examples that let the properties and the strategies we identified shine.

Sofia Morais: One property of transformative decisions that you discuss in your paper is the change of self. You mentioned that when people anticipate a significant change in who they are, they face a dilemma. Could you explain what this dilemma is about and what sort of strategies people might use to tackle this dilemma?

Shahar Hechtlinger: So, first of all, this again connects very well with work that has been done in philosophy, right? We talked about Laurie Paul's work, but also work by another philosopher, Edna Ullmann-Margalit, who also wrote about core-affecting decisions and transformative decisions. When we are facing a decision, there is often the prospect of many changes occurring. So, this can be psychological changes, physical changes, or both. Imagine, for instance, a bariatric surgery that one is considering, or the changes that come with becoming a parent. What the person needs to do is, if you want to use the old utility framework, anticipate all of that, right? And you need to know exactly how you will change. Since you can't do that, you basically need to bet on a certain version of yourself. So, what can often happen is that we imagine some kind of ideal self, and we have this image in mind. We can then choose from the perspective of this ideal self. Or we imagine ourselves at the end of life, or in ten years from now, or whatnot. And we try to take the perspective of this self. So, basically, if you want to put it in a dilemma: from the perspective of which self do we want to choose? Is it from the perspective of the current self only? Or is it from the perspective of some kind of future or ideal self?

Sofia Morais: I find this interesting because, on one hand, it is the current self that makes the decision. And you want to be authentic, right? You want to decide for yourself, with your own mind. But in the end, it is my future self who will deal with the consequences of what I decide today. So, you could even say, well, forget about your current self altogether and just decide based on what a potential future self would want.

Shahar Hechtlinger: Right. And a lot of strategies actually do take the perspective of the current self, many of them. But there are also a few strategies that we mention and develop that take this different perspective of either a future or an ideal self.

Sofia Morais: In your paper, you have the story of this Iranian judo athlete.

Shahar Hechtlinger: Saeid Mollaei.

Sofia Morais: Would you like to explain what happened to him?

Shahar Hechtlinger: So, he was in a judo competition, and Iranian athletes often have this unwritten rule dictated to them that whenever there is an Israeli opponent, they need to withdraw from the competition. Mollaei had his lifelong dream at stake of becoming an Olympic champion. And basically, this dream led him to decide not to withdraw from the competition. He disregarded any other considerations that may have been, or were, very important, like his safety and the safety of his family. He basically put everything at stake for this ideal self who has the goal and wants to become an Olympic champion.

Sofia Morais: In your paper, you describe a second strategy that people could also use to avoid having to make this tradeoff between current and future self, which is to make a choice that the future self won't regret. Right? And you cite the case of Jeff Bezos.

Shahar Hechtlinger: I think some people may know this example because it's quite popular in culture. So basically, when Jeff Bezos... He had a steady job. He was employed at a good company and was rather okay with the situation. But he had this idea of starting an internet-based company, and the process which he describes is what we then coin as the name minimax inaction regret. The minimax part is about minimizing regret—we want to minimize regret. And the inaction part talks about specifically minimizing regrets from inaction. Why? There are a lot of models that talk about minimizing regret. What is special here is the emphasis on inaction. We know from quite a broad literature that what people regret in the short term are actions—things that they do. I don't know, if you think about what you ate for lunch: “Oh, I should have eaten something healthier” or “I should have done this workout,” “I should have called my mom,” and so on and so forth. But then, when you look at the long term, what people regret most is inaction—things they did not do, which is striking, right? So, people regret missed opportunities for relationships, time they did not spend...

Sofia Morais: With their loved ones.

Shahar Hechtlinger: Exactly. And also business opportunities. When you look at Jeff Bezos' description of how he made the choice, you very much see a structure that fits very well with minimax inaction regret. So first, you ask yourself: In X years—so in his case, I think, if I'm not mistaken, he was talking about when I'm 80 years old, so really, really old—will I regret doing this? And then he gives himself an answer based on this, yes or no. Simple, you don't have to calculate anything, any utilities, nothing. Okay, if you give yourself the "yes" answer, it's done—it's done right there. You just, you don't do it. But if the answer is "no, I'm not going to regret doing that," then you move on and ask: Will I regret not doing this? So, will this be a missed opportunity for my future self? Now, of course, you might be wrong, right? Like, so... you need to bet on something being informative. So here, the bet is on imagining the future self being somewhat true to what will actually be. But this is the case for any decision strategy. Then, if you get the answer "yes, I will regret this," then you should do it. So this is what the policy of minimax inaction regret sort of dictates.

Sofia Morais: And in the case of Jeff Bezos, so he reported that he would have regretted not starting the new business.

Shahar Hechtlinger: Yes, exactly. I mean, we all know how the story goes.

Sofia Morais: Another property of transformative decisions that I'd like us to discuss is that some of them are expensive to undo or even impossible to change once they've been made. Could you explain how the strategy known as testing the waters can help minimize the costs of reversing a decision?

Shahar Hechtlinger: A lot of things are irreversible, right? So, even with your lunch, you can't un-eat it. But that's not really what we are talking about here. We're talking about situations where the reversal costs are either very high, take forever, or are literally impossible. For instance, if you think about gender-affirming surgery, you can try to undo it, but I don't think this is really possible. The same goes for hormone therapy; once the voice changes, there's no going back.

Sofia Morais: And having a child.

Shahar Hechtlinger: Having a child, of course.

Sofia Morais: Even moving to another country, you know, moving back also has some costs associated with it.

Shahar Hechtlinger: Exactly. You can often go back. Not in all cases, though. Sometimes if you flee war or a totalitarian regime, then you actually can't go back. But even if you can move between countries in Europe, there are still quite high costs attached to this act. Now, with testing the waters, this is a strategy that faces the perceived irreversibility head-on. It tries to find the setting in which the decision you are thinking about has the least irreversible consequences. So, you could try to find a test environment. For instance, if you're thinking about coming out, you can start by dropping hints and not really saying anything, and wait for a response. Then you adjust your steps based on the feedback from the environment. You could also, in the same example, tell a few trusted individuals before telling people in a larger circle. The idea is to keep a controlled setting. If the feedback is positive, you continue in the last controlled setting. If the feedback is negative, you try to find a different controlled setting, and if this is not possible, you stop the process altogether. So, you really dip your toes in and go step by step.

Sofia Morais: In your article you also mention an interesting case, the case of Christine Blasey Ford, that also applied the strategy testing the waters when disclosing a sexual assault. Can you describe how her story went?

Shahar Hechtlinger: So first of all, just a disclaimer: All the cases we are talking about, we reconstruct the decision-making process, right? So it might be that they did something slightly different, but from the evidence that we find, we believe that her process, her initial process, can be quite accurately described as testing the waters. She was living quite a serene life when she realized that the guy who sexually assaulted her many years before was being nominated for a Supreme Court spot. This started a sequence of deliberation processes that took her quite a while, considering whether to come forward. To keep her identity secret, in those earlier stages, she took very controlled steps. So things like talking to a journalist, but doing it through a tip line. So basically keeping her anonymity. Then taking another step and writing a letter to a senator on the Judiciary Committee, and so on and so forth. So it was really like at each step, there was a little bit more revealing of her identity, but in a very controlled way, so that she and her family were kept safe. Eventually, this backfired, also because her identity was revealed without her consent. But still, from the decision-making perspective, this initial part of the process, she eventually also used another strategy tool to make the final choice, is sort of a classic case of testing the waters.

Sofia Morais: So the last property of transformative decisions I'd like to discuss is conflicting cues or reasons. Can you explain what this means and how the strategy elimination by aspects works in this situation?

Shahar Hechtlinger: Many choices, not just transformative life decisions, present us with conflicts, right? So, going back to the ice cream shop, even there, most people would assume that they can't have it all. Like, they're not going to taste all the ice cream flavors in the shop, at least not in one day. And you face some kind of small, but for children maybe even a significant, conflict. You need to choose between chocolate, vanilla, and fruit. There are so many things to choose from, and there might be things that you care about more or less. Now, when we talk about the really important decisions in life, those conflicts can often be between things that are incommensurable, which means that those are things like our values. It's often really our... The things we value the most that cannot be compared on the same metric. So it's not like those are all tastes of ice cream, and we can compare them in some kind of way. It can be things like our freedom and someone else's, or the value of friendship or family values. And in the case of Mollaei, which we discussed before, and his goal to be an Olympian, it's the things that are so substantial and so important to us that any goal to try to compare them like that basically fails.

Sofia Morais: And when cues conflict, it means that you are in a situation where you can't have both.

Shahar Hechtlinger: Often what happens is that one option represents one side of the conflict, and another option represents the other.

Sofia Morais: And how does the strategy elimination by aspects help people tackle the situation of conflicting cues.

Shahar Hechtlinger: Basically, what it does is avoid having to make tradeoffs between alternatives by using a quite intuitive process of elimination. For instance, if we take the example of moving, let's say there are a few countries you want to choose from. There are a couple of things that are important for you about those choices. With elimination by aspects, you don't have to compare everything all at once. Instead, you start with the most important aspect. For example, you want to be close to your family. This already eliminates some alternatives. Then, let's say the next aspect is having good job opportunities. This eliminates more options, and so on, until you're left with just one choice. This process is non-compensatory, meaning it doesn’t involve tradeoffs since it follows a process of elimination. Now, some might say that you still need to rank these aspects by importance, so you are making a comparison. But here we're talking about what's called weak ordering, not a full-on tradeoff like we had in the utility case.

Sofia Morais: I know that you're currently looking into the strategies that people use to make transformative life decisions. Can you give us a quick overview of that study, and perhaps a sneak peek into the most interesting findings?

Shahar Hechtlinger: Yes, very happy to. Basically, we took this framework that we just talked about. And of course, we only had a taste of the framework, right? So we talked about a couple of examples, but we have a framework with five of those properties and many potential strategies that people use. But, of course, this still begs the question: Okay, we went another step to say how people can make those decisions, but we still don't know how they really make them. Does it align with what we propose here? Do they actually use quite simple strategies to make those decisions? Or maybe people actually try to do something that is more like maximizing at the end of the day, right? Because after all, these are the most important decisions in their lives. If they don't maximize there, where would they do it? We tested all of this empirically. We asked around a thousand people in the UK to report big, important life decisions in the last two years. First of all, we found that, very much in line with what we've discussed before, it is a very common phenomenon. It's not an out-of-this-world kind of thing. People make those decisions really all the time.

Sofia Morais: Can you give examples of decisions that they report having made?

Shahar Hechtlinger: So the most frequent ones were in the domains of family, relationships, migration, and everything that has to do with work and career. So things like changing jobs, retiring. We had a representative sample, so we also sampled older adults. Becoming parents was not extremely frequent because it's a representative sample, but we also saw evidence for that. Moving was very, very frequent, so relocating either within the country or going abroad. But we also, of course, saw more idiosyncratic decisions that not many people reported, but are also very important. Going back to the beginning, we said, right, one thing can be transformative to one person and not for another. And also, the social setting defines a lot of it.

Sofia Morais: And in this study, what did you find? Did people report using simpler strategies or more complex ones?

Shahar Hechtlinger: We mostly found confirmation for our theory, meaning that the majority of people use simpler strategies, often ones that are characterized in our framework, so non-compensatory strategies that don’t make any tradeoffs at all. But the interesting part is that you still see a trace of people's wish to maximize. Because we didn't only ask people to report how they made decisions, but also how they would recommend someone else to make the exact same decision. And there we saw this pattern flip, meaning that when people were asked to recommend, the majority of them recommended compensatory, more complex strategies that are more in line with the maximizing idea. So mostly not full-on expected utility with all of the intricacies, but something that goes in that direction. So making tradeoffs. So I find this a very interesting pattern because although in the way people, at least unconsciously, understand that they cannot make these decisions in the expected utility kind of way, they still have this wish to be doing it in a more maximizing way.

Sofia Morais: Where do you think this comes from?

Shahar Hechtlinger: I mean, this study was conducted in the UK, so in the West. I am curious to find out if this is really cultural—if this tendency to do, this wish to maximize, is something that we will only see in the West or not. So I think it might as well be cultural. I think another part is really the stakes involved; when you have those high stakes, you just really want to exhaust every possibility and make all possible comparisons. People imagine tables and whatnot. But at the end of the day, as we've covered quite nicely, I think today, there is so much uncertainty about the world, about yourself, that sometimes the only way to go is really by using very simple strategies that address the real-world conditions in which we make those very influential decisions.

Sofia Morais: Do you think it might also be fear of regret that makes people prefer or recommend a more complex approach to decision making? You could say, in the future, regardless of how things turn out for you, regardless the consequences, you can say, well, I did the best I could.

Shahar Hechtlinger: I mean, I don't have data to back this up, so I would need to speculate, but I think this might as well be the case. It might also be fear of regret. Although we do know that both the people who used more compensatory and non-compensatory strategies, they don’t regret much. So I think this has a lot to do with the fact that it's often irreversible. So you need to, even if you might not be the happiest, find a way to rationalize, maybe, or explain to yourself why the situation is actually preferable, and so on and so forth. But these are speculations.

Sofia Morais: So one last question for you, Shahar. To what extent do you think that research on transformative life decisions can actually empower decision makers?

Shahar Hechtlinger: As I said, we are at the very beginning, right? So there is a lot we still don't know. But I think with gathering more and more knowledge on how people really face these decisions, and already even with the conceptual framework, I think people can gain much more insight into what exactly they do. So, can they sort of put themselves into any of these strategies and understand their decision situation? I think it can also be influential for practitioners, people who aid decision-makers in making these life transitions. These are often topics that come up in counseling, coaching, and so on. I hope that this is the beginning of a path that can also, in the end, empower people. Because this is really the main goal, right? We want to understand this not just for curiosity but to be able to help people make decisions they are happier with.

Sofia Morais: And do you think that actually the simple awareness that there are certain things you just can't possibly know, that this awareness can also be helpful?

Shahar Hechtlinger: So I think that, for me at least, I can speak from my personal perspective, for me, that was maybe the most valuable lesson in getting into this topic. I think it gives you freedom and also humility because you can't know everything. Some things are just out of our control, and acknowledging that, I think, is a lot.

Sofia Morais: Shahar, I want to thank you for sharing your expertise and for being here today. It was a pleasure to have you on the podcast.

Shahar Hechtlinger: Thank you so much, Sofia. It was lovely.

[End of transcript]