Of choices, decisions and ambivalence (appeared on L'Express, Mauritius, November 2010)

When I noticed the title “Why so many people can’t make decisions” on Wall Street Journal online, for once I did not hesitate and read the article. Making a decisive choice is often difficult for me, bringing my manliness under self-scrutiny, because I fall short as a “man of decision”. But WSJ salvaged my battered ego, for now I realise that I probably have an overdose of “ambivalence” - that is I tend to see the world more in shades of gray rather than black and white.

Sometimes I long for the days when I went to the only store in my village and ordered for generic soap and toothpaste, when the line dividing brand and item was fuzzy, like “Frigidaire”.  Nowadays I often find myself engaged in a complex balancing act in the shampoo aisle, optimizing on price, appropriateness for my hair type, commitment to novelty, shape of bottle, and how long can I afford to linger over stupid shampoo. 

Ambivalence (ambi means “both” and valence means “strength” in Latin) is about having conflicting views over situations, as opposed to unequivocal, crystal clear opinions about what the government should do and who plays the best football. Researchers ignored ambivalence for a long time, but now there is growing evidence on its significant impact on your life – from career, relationships to political choices. So if you are usually “in two minds”, have “mixed feelings” and often find yourself “sitting on the fence”, you are probably not running short on ambivalence.    

Ambivalence is not necessarily a bad thing – it can be a sign of maturity, enabling people to "come to grips with the complexity of the world," says Jeff Larsen, psychology professor at Texas Tech. Black-and-white thinkers tend to speak their minds, be predictable, but are less inclined to consider others’ viewpoints. Ambivalent souls will evaluate all sides of an argument, scrutinize the evidence, make lists of pros and cons, and reject overly-simplified information. This enables them develop better coping strategies, and fosters creativity.

But it often leads to procrastination, regrets on decisions, and erratic job performance, argues René Ziegler, professor of social and organizational psychology at the University of Tübingen in Germany. Such shades-of-gray people tend to have trouble in relationships. They stay in relationships longer and experience more fighting. They are also more likely to get divorced, says Mario Mikulincer, Dean of the New School of Psychology at the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya in Israel.

Your propensity for ambivalence may depend on personality traits, your need to reach a conclusion or your comfort with uncertainty. Developmental psychologists argue that it has a lot to do with how ambivalent the environment you were brought up in was. Culture also can be a determining factor. In the west, “simultaneously seeing good and bad violates our world view, our need to put things in boxes," says Dr. Larsen. But eastern philosophies thrive on dualism, that is something can be one thing as well as another at the same time.

In a world of more expectations, increased freedom and plethora of alternatives, choosing a job, spouse or cereal has become more involved. People typically employ a variety of tactics to decide: list down pros and cons of each option, prioritise utility or benefits, ask the expert, toss a coin, consult a “pussari” or what I think is the most common technique: “satisficing”, a concept developed by Herbert Simon, the only person to have won the Nobel Prize in economics and the Turing Award (which is the the Nobel Prize of computer science). Satisficing is about looking till you reach the first option that meets your requirements to a reasonable level, with sufficiently high probability that further search will be futile. So the boy you chose may not be the one that God intended for you, but is it worth waiting for up to ten years in the hope of finding that soul-mate? The same argument applies for choosing dental floss. Of course, for ambivalent people, the search period tends to get longer with generous estimates of the probability of better lying ahead – that is, there is more need to optimise rather than merely satisfice.

Our ability to choose, decide and deliberate depends on the brain hardware as well. There are brain regions (or cortices) that are involved in decision making processes. Research shows that neural activation in these regions depends on whether decisions are made by choice or through instructions. Brain studies on monkeys and macaques also show that neural activity represents decisions as well as certainty associated with the decisions – and how past experience reinforces learning to make new decisions.

On an unrelated issue, I wonder if Mauritian macaques were used for the studies above. The recent images of poor treatment inflicted on those animals were horrible. But if we stop breeding macaques for research, somebody elsewhere in the world will fill in the gap. Also, should I value animal life as much as human life, knowing very well the latter depends heavily on medical research on the former. Also, why a different stance towards monkeys, and let kids massacre frogs in classrooms? And yet, one cannot avoid feeling disturbed for what we put macaques (and their families) through. Well, it is still not all black and white to me.