The Psychology of Decision-Making: Why Choosing Feels So Hard

Decision-making might be the most frequent challenge we face every day, and it gets hardest when every option is appealing, or when none of them are. In this lecture, Dr. Amitai Shenhav, Associate Professor of Psychology and the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute at UC Berkeley, shares research from his lab on why some choices cost us so much mental energy, and how we might make them easier.

Amitai will walk through studies showing that reframing choices so options feel less mutually exclusive can make decisions feel less conflicting and more efficient. He will also explore why people avoid or delay decisions that feel like a lose-lose, and how a simple shift, choosing what to reject rather than what to select, can reduce that avoidance. This effect even shows up in voting behavior, where people are far more willing to pick a candidate when framed as rejecting the worse option.

Combining computational modeling with behavioral and neural data, this talk offers a fresh way to think about the hidden costs of choosing, and how we might lower them.