Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind (Houghton Mifflin; 2008)

9. Imagine that your decisions may be spot-checked. Research has shown that people who believe that they will have to justify their answers are less biased than people who don't. When we expect to be held accountable for our decisions, we tend to invest more cognitive effort and make correspondingly more sophisticated decisions, analyzing information in more detail.

For that matter (and no, I'm not making this up) office workers are more likely to pay for coffee from a communal coffee machine if the coffee machine is positioned under a poster featuring a pair of eyes — which somehow makes people feel that they are accountable

— than under a poster that has a picture of flowers.

10. Distance yourself. Buddhists tells us that everything seems more important in the moment, and for the most part, they're right. If an out-of-control car is bearing down on you, by all means, drop everything and focus all of your energies on the short-term goal of getting out of the way. But if I want to top off the meal with that chocolate cake, I should ask myself this: am I overvaluing my current goals (satisfying my sweet tooth) relative to my long-term goals (staying healthy)? It'll feel good now to send that email excoriating your boss, but next week you'll probably regret it.

Our mind is set up to ponder the near and the far in almost totally different ways, the near in concrete terms, the far in abstract terms. It's not always better to think in more distant terms; remember the last time you promised to do something six months hence, say, attend a charity event or volunteer at your child's school? Your promise probably seemed innocuous at the time but might have felt like an imposition when the date came to actually fulfill it. Whenever we can, we should ask, How will my future self feel about this decision? It pays to recognize the differences in how we treat the here and now versus the future, and try to use and balance both modes of thinking

— immediate and distant — so we won't fall prey to basing choices entirely on what happens to be in our mind in the immediate moment. (A fine corollary: wait awhile. If you still want it tomorrow, it may be important; if the need passes, it probably wasn't.) Empirical research shows that irrationality often dissipates with time, and complex decisions work best if given time to steep.

Beware the vivid, the personal, and the anecdotal. This is another corollary to "distancing ourselves," also easier said than done. In earlier chapters we saw the relative temptation prompted by cookies that we can see versus cookies that we merely read about. An even more potent illustration might be Timothy Wilson's study of undergraduates and condom brands, which yielded a classic "do as I say, not as I do" result. Subjects in the experiment were given two sources of information, the results of a statistically robust study in Consumer Reports favoring condoms of Brand A and a single anecdotal tale (allegedly written by another student) recommending Brand B, on the grounds that a condom of Brand A had burst in the middle of intercourse, leading to considerable anxiety about possible pregnancy. Virtually all students agreed in principle that Consumer Reports would be more reliable and also that they would not want their friends to choose on the basis of anecdotal evidence. But when asked to choose for themselves, nearly a third (31 percent) still yielded to the vivid and anecdotal, and went with Brand B. Our four-legged ancestors perhaps couldn't help but pay attention to whatever seemed most colorful or dramatic; we have the luxury to take the time to reflect, and it behooves us to use it, compensating for our vulnerability to the vivid by giving special weight to the impersonal but scientific.

Pick your spots. Decisions are psychologically, and even physically, costly, and it would be impossible to delay every decision until we had complete information and time to reflect on every contingency and counteralternative. The strategies I've given in this list are handy, but never forget the tale of Buridan's Ass, the donkey that starved to death while trying to choose between two equally attrac

tive, equally close patches of hay. Reserve your most careful decision making for the choices that matter most.

13. Try to be rational. This last suggestion may sound unbelievably trivial, on par with the world's most worthless stock market advice ("Buy low, sell high" — theoretically sound yet utterly useless). But reminding yourself to be rational is not as pointless as it sounds.