From Annie Duke’s book “How to Decide”
Why pros and cons lists are dangerous.
- “When we approach a decision, we have already started to form an opinion about what the right option is. Usually we don’t even know we have already formed an opinion, but that opinion can, nonetheless, end up in the driver’s seat, directing our decision process.” (p. 128)
- “This exposes the biggest issue with a pros and cons list: Like your intuition and gut, it also serves at the pleasure of the inside view, getting you to the decision you want to make rather than the decision that is objectively better.” (p.128)
- “Want to reject an option? You’ll focus on the con side of the list, expanding that side of the comparision. Want to move forward with an option? You’ll focus and expand on the pro side of the list as the cons hide in the shadows.” (p.128)
- “A pros and cons list is generated entirely from your perspective, absent the outside view, easily infected by reasoning in a way that is motivated to support a conclusion you want to get to. In fact, if you wanted to create a decision tool to amplify bias, it would look like a pros and cons list.” (p. 128)
- “For reasons that are going to become clear, a good decision tool seeks to reduce the role of cognitive bias (such as overconfidence, hindsight bias, or confirmation bias) and a pros and cons list tends to amplify the role of bias.” (p. xvii).
- “What you’ll learn from this book is that a pros and cons list is not a particularly effective decision tool if you are trying to get closer to the objectively best decision.” (p. XVii)
The good things about a pros and cons list.
- “The good news about a pros and cons list is that it at least gets you thinking about the upside (the pros) and the downside (the cons), the start of Step 2. The bad news is that a pros and cons list doesn’t get you thinking about magnitude, how big a positive any pro is or how big a negative any con is, which is also necessary to Step 2.” (p. 78)
- “Pros and cons lists are flat, as if (payoff) size doesn’t matter. Because it is merely in list form, a pros and cons list treats the chance of an early arrival as equal to the possibility of getting into a serious traffic accident. Without explicit information about size, about the magnitude of any pro or con, it is unclear how you would compare the positive and negative sides of the list.” (p. 78)
- “If there are ten pros and five cons, does that mean you should go with the decision? It is impossible to say without information about the size of the payoffs, because without that you can’t figure out if the upside potential outweighs the downside.” (p. 78)
- “This exposes yet another dimension that pros and cons lists lack: information about the likelihood of any of the pros or cons unfolding. Pros and cons lists make it impossible to execute Steps 3 and 4 of the decision process with any fidelity, because both of those steps require you to think about probability.” (p. 88)
- “A pros and cons list is not really designed as a tool to help you compare choices, but rather as a tool to help you evaluate a single choice. And because a pros and cons list is flat, it is not even particularly useful for that. While it might be better than not using a tool at all (although even that isn’t clear), you might as well be using a hammer to pound that screw into the dresser. That’s going to create an unstable structure.” (p. 88)”