The easiest way to make a good decision

How a last-minute impulse to drop everything and come to India was the best way to decide, writes Ami Dalal.

Last year, I neared college graduation with two problems. The first was a business degree itching to be cashed in and threatening to amortize within one year. The second was 12 gossiping Indian aunties, 11 Indian friends on Wall Street, 10 cousins in med school, 9 weeks before I was technically unemployed, 8 months that I had done nothing, 7 aborted attempts to visit my career counselor, 6 wishes for a winning lottery ticket, 5 job interviews, 4 positions tendered, 3 feeble reasons why I didn't want them, 2 Indian parents to calm, and 1 renegade brother whose footsteps I was forbidden to follow in.

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My best job offer was as a junior financial analyst for Citigroup. Not the most alluring position, but too respectable to refuse. The human resources staff wined and dined me in New York City, introduced me to twenty-something employees who loved their jobs, and then let me loose on the town with a $70 expense account for dinner. I was given three weeks to decide and had one day left to mail in my acceptance letter. My parents were calling me on the hour.

The thought of accepting that job made me cringe. But if I didn't want to hop onto the business track, surely I must've had another career in mind. A passion I had always wanted to pursue. No, not really. So I tried to be a little more logical about the whole thing. I made a three-page list of pros and cons. The odds came out overwhelmingly in favor of accepting the position.

After all, why not first move to a dynamic city like New York and then look for something different while I was getting paid a cushy salary. I was too averse to sitting in an office all day; it couldn't be that bad. Besides, the first job is usually miserable, so I should stop whining and get it over with. And, anyway, did I have any better ideas in mind?

Usually a bit light on commonsense, even I could see that accepting a well-paid position in a major city would act as a springboard to newer and more exciting things. But, for some reason, every time I imagined stepping foot into that bite-sized, gray-carpeted cubicle, I felt a sharp pain in my stomach. Melodramatic? Sure. Psychosomatic? Maybe. Unwilling to become an adult? Okay, let's move on.

I can't quite explain what made me say no to a high-salaried job with no attractive alternative in mind. Neither can I say how I decided the day of graduation to spend the next year in India. As half-witted as it sounds, one option felt bad, and one option felt good. Joining my colleagues in 18-hour workdays staring at computer screens felt bad, really bad. Running away from everything felt good, almost too good.

My mother warned me that I was putting off the career questions that I'd have to answer when I returned. Avoiding my problems wouldn't bring me any closer to a solution. I knew she was absolutely right, but it didn't matter. I had to leave, and I had to get as far away from the resume-toting real world as possible. It was fight-or-flight; I opted for flight.

Ten months have passed since my arrival in India, and I can now evaluate the wisdom behind an irrational, frightened, and hasty decision based on nothing more than a gut feeling. It was the best decision I have ever made.

How did such an ill-planned venture turn out this well? I can't explain it to my parents, I can't explain it to my friends, and I can't even quite explain it to myself. But, recently, I stumbled upon a theory that explains the science behind inexplicably good decisions.

If you have a complicated decision to make, the latest advice is to stop thinking. We usually make snap judgments on simple decisions and brood over complex decisions, but a new study published by Dr. Ap Dijksterhuis, a psychologist at the University of Amsterdam, suggests we should switch it around.

Dr. Dijksterhuis asked volunteers to pick the best car from a set of four attributes including leg room and fuel consumption. They were asked to choose after four minutes, and most people selected the car that best fit the criteria. People were then presented with more complex criteria of twelve attributes, and their success rate lowered to twenty-five percent. The outcome was no better than selecting at random.

When the participants were distracted for several minutes with puzzles or anagrams, over half chose the best car. "For complex decisions," says Dr. Dijkterhuis, "it's better to engage in unconscious thought." Distracting the volunteers helped them make good choices because the reasoning was handed over to the unconscious mind.

With complex decisions, the mind cannot process more than a few factors at once and will attribute undue importance to the wrong ones. Constantly re-thinking the problem produces slightly different conclusions -- not only confusing but also indicative of faulty judgment.

The unconscious can integrate large amounts of information into an evaluative summary judgment. "Conscious thought has some disadvantages. It has such a small capacity and is not good at making complex decisions," explains Dr. Dijkterhuis, "If you think too much about a very complex problem, you consciously only take into account a subset of information and not always a very good subset."

In his experiments, people made better choices if they stopped thinking about complex problems for a few minutes. Sometimes the best choice could be measure objectively, in others it was based on how happy people were with their decision.

Jonathon Schooler of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver is not ready to accept this theory: "What I think may be really critical is to engage in [conscious] reflection but not make a decision right away."

Dr. Dijkterhuis does not propose to simply trust a gut reaction. He gathers all of the relevant information and first gives it his full attention. Then, he says to "sleep on it before you decide." Call it instinct, call it intuition, or call it a little hunch that makes sense to no one but you. Whatever it is, now even science suggests putting your problems on the back burner and letting your unconscious do the rest.s