You are staring at two nearly identical apartments, or two health insurance plans, or two flavors of ice cream, and you cannot decide. Or maybe you are even torn between two suitors. You go back and forth and cannot settle. In an earlier post, I explained why this happens: Your brain is slower and noisier when two options are close in (subjective) value, a well-documented effect called strength of preference. But hesitation invites a tempting story. Maybe you are not actually undecided. Maybe some part of you wants suitor A and another part wants suitor B, and your wavering is that hidden preference leaking out, roughly in proportion to how torn you feel. My coauthors and I just tested this idea directly, in a paper published in Management Science, and the answer is reassuring: No, your back-and-forth is not a secret ballot.
The idea of a hidden vote
The notion is not far-fetched, and it has already been commercialized. A quick search of any app store turns up tools like Decision Maker & Chooser, Randomix, or Spin the Wheel, all built on the same premise: If you cannot decide, spin a wheel, roll a dice, or flip a coin, and let chance settle it for you. The implicit promise is that this is a shortcut to something you already wanted, just faster. It would also explain why people keep flip-flopping between two restaurants, two Netflix shows, or, yes, two suitors. Under this view, you are not making mistakes when you waver. You are running an internal version of one of those apps, a spinning wheel tailored to whatever split reflects your true taste, say, 70 percent for this one, 30 percent for that one, and your wavering just carries out that split imperfectly.
Putting the hidden vote to the test
To test this, 103 participants repeatedly chose between pairs of lotteries (small gambles with money at stake), some riskier but with higher prizes than others. Each pair repeated four times, with repetitions popping up randomly as the experiment went on. As expected, choices were more inconsistent across repetitions when the two options were closer in subjective value. Here, “subjective value” was measured separately and depends on your attitude towards risk. We then gave the same participants a chance to say, for each pair, exactly how they would want their four chances split between the two options: all four to one, three to one, two to two (in effect, a fair coin toss), one to three, or all four to the other. If wavering really reflects a hidden preference for splitting, a person’s actual pattern of repeated choices should line up with the split that same person said they wanted, pair by pair.
It did not. Among the cases where participants stated a genuine wish to split their choice, the pattern of their repeated choices matched that stated wish only about 15 percent of the time. Wavering and wanting to split are correlated; both increase as two options get closer in value, but statistically, one does not predict the other well enough for them to be the same thing.
A trick for when you are stuck
Our second finding suggests a practical trick. When participants were given a costless, visible option to hand a choice over to an actual coin toss, they used it only about a quarter of the time, even for pairs where they were close to indifference. Most people simply picked one option and moved on. In a further experiment, we added a small, explicit cost to using the coin toss (from 10 cents to half a dollar), and the frequency of choosing it dropped sharply, to under 5 percent, even though the cost was often trivial next to what was at stake.
This suggests a trick for the next time you struggle with a decision. First, remember that the time you spend struggling is itself informative: It tells you the options are close enough in value that the choice barely matters. That time is also valuable, and you are wasting it. So just notice what you are leaning toward right now and go with it. If that does not settle things, imagine you had to pay 10 dollars for someone else to flip a coin and decide for you. Our participants faced a real (if much smaller) version of that cost, and overwhelmingly chose not to pay it. Ask yourself the same question. If paying to have someone else pick for you does not sound worth it, neither is the struggle. Pick.
What this means for you
Put together, these results paint a fairly reassuring picture. Your brain does slow down and grow noisier when considering two options that are close in subjective value. This is well established, and it is why agonizing over small decisions is often a waste of time (see the earlier post for concrete tips). What is new here is that this same struggle does not translate into a genuine, deliberate wish to split the difference. Most people, most of the time, would rather just decide, even when a free way to hand the decision to chance sits right in front of them.
So if you are torn between two nearly equivalent choices, or even two suitors, do not read your hesitation as evidence that you secretly want a bit of both, or that the right move is to alternate between them indefinitely. Go ahead and toss a coin, or open one of those decision apps, if that helps you move on. Just do not mistake the result of the coin toss for something you knew all along. Your indecision is telling you the options are close in value, not that you are running a hidden spinning wheel. Pick one option, and treat the tiny cost of “getting it wrong” as exactly that: tiny.