Time to close a door?

Predictably Irrational:
The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions
by Dan Ariely

A hungry donkey approaches a barn one day looking for hay and discovers two haystacks of identical size at the two opposite sides of the barn. The donkey stands in the middle of the barn between the two haystacks, not knowing which to select. Hours go by, but he still can’t make up his mind. Unable to decide, the donkey eventually dies of starvation.

We like options. My friends will tell you that options are bad for me, they joke that I need to get to a restaurant at earlier than everyone else so that when they show up, I know what I want to eat and drink and can order with the rest of them.

But we have a problem. We don't like to close doors. Ariely conducted various experiments with students to study this behavior and found that even though picking a single door would have been more beneficial for the student, every student made sure to explore each door and worked to make sure those doors remained open.

Besides decision making and having options, there's another area in our lives where this impacts us. This is where behavioral economics comes into play. We don't like the idea of losing something and this is very evident on sites like Ebay where bidding is at play. When someone places the highest bid on an item, they start to anticipate ownership of that item and imagine life with that item. They take a virtual ownership. And this drives them to keep the highest bid. They can no longer imagine not having the item.

We have an irrational compulsion to keep doors open.

We need to allow some doors to close, lest we become like the donkey and starve ourselves in indecision.


Also see Decision Making: Everything is Relative for more review on this book.