Better Than Conscious?: DECISION MAKING, the HUMAN MIND, and IMPLICATIONS FOR INSTITUTIONS

Conscious control enables human decision makers to override routines, to exercise
willpower, to find innovative solutions, to learn by instruction, to decide collectively, and to
justify their choices. These and many more advantages, however, come at a price: the ability to
process information consciously is severely limited and conscious decision makers are liable to
hundreds of biases. Measured against the norms of rational choice theory, conscious decision makers
perform poorly. But if people forego conscious control, in appropriate tasks, they perform
surprisingly better: they handle vast amounts of information; they update prior information; they
find appropriate solutions to ill-defined problems.

This inaugural Strüngmann
Forum Report explores the human ability to make decisions, consciously as well as without conscious
control. It explores decision-making strategies, including deliberate and intuitive; explicit and
implicit; processing information serially and in parallel, with a general-purpose apparatus, or with
task-specific neural subsystems. The analysis is at four levels -- neural, psychological,
evolutionary, and institutional -- and the discussion is extended to the definition of social
problems and the design of better institutional interventions. The results presented differ greatly
from what could be expected under standard rational choice theory and deviate even more from the
alternate behavioral view of institutions. New challenges emerge (for example, the issue of free
will) and some purported social problems almost disappear if one adopts a more adequate model of
human decision making.