The Psychology of “Big” Life Decisions

Consider the numerous decisions we face every day: what to eat for breakfast, what we should wear to work or a restaurant, who we should spend time with, and whether and what to watch on our screens after the day ends. Those are undoubtedly choices that could fall under the umbrella of “little decisions.” We make them regularly, they normally don’t come with dire consequences, and we can learn from them and do something different the next day.

But there’s a host of other decisions that might fall under a different umbrella: They’re the ones that we rarely make, but they carry major consequences with them. Life’s “big decisions,” for instance, represent questions like whether to get married or break up, move or stay put, change careers or carry on, or lean into a new identity or continue living in a safer but less authentic way.

While so much academic psychology and behavioral economics have studied small decisions, relatively little has touched on the big ones. And for good reason: Big decisions are complex, they are messy, what rings true for one person may not for another, and they are exceptionally difficult to audit and assess after the fact.

You Could Always Flip a Coin

With all that said, recent work has started to make some progress in understanding some strategies that might work. One of my favorite forays into this space came from the economist John List, whom you might know from Freakonomics fame.

Several years ago, he asked people to visit his website if they were facing a consequential life choice. About 20,000 folks responded. Should they quit smoking? Should they rent or should they buy? Get a tattoo? And then he had each respondent flip a virtual coin and agree to take the path that the coin toss suggested.

Of course, not everyone complied immediately. (I kept getting stuck on having a marital conversation about these choices: “Yes, I am going to change careers. Why? Well… see, there’s this website, and I flipped a coin, and well, it suggested I should.”)

But over time, more folks did heed the advice of the coin flip. More remarkably, though, is how they felt afterward. At both two months and six months after the coin flip, the people who made a change experienced greater well-being than the ones who stuck with the status quo. The suggestion that List has cautiously made from this research is that if you are considering a big choice, action may trump inaction when it comes to your happiness.¹

What if I Don’t Want to Flip a Coin?

As much as I love this paper, I find it hard to advise people to flip a coin or simply take the path of doing something over nothing. (I’ve tried when my students ask me about these types of questions, and my advice is normally met with a quizzical look and a “Really?”)

Just this month, however, new research came out that offers a refreshingly practical guide to consequential or “transformative” life decisions. The paper, led by psychologist Shahar Hechtlinger and her colleagues, suggests that some of the same strategies that have worked for smaller contexts might be adapted to the bigger ones.²

I’ll note that they offer a comprehensive list of decisions that can be considered transformative, not only from current norms but also ones that might fall under this bucket in the future. For instance, becoming a parent, undergoing genetic testing, retiring or going back to school, or joining the military are decisions that have been considered consequential for quite some time.

But with macroeconomic changes and sociopolitical/technological changes, there may be other transformative decisions that could arise: things like living underground due to climate change, undergoing gene therapy, getting a brain implant to communicate with computers, or — and this one I’d consider a little far-fetched — revealing that you are a cyborg.

Because their entire framework for addressing these decisions is beyond the scope of this post, let me just spotlight four of the most practical and easily implementable solutions here.

1. You could just count. Formerly known as “tallying,” you could simply count the pros and cons of doing or not doing something and pick the choice with the most pros and the fewest cons. Obvious? Yes. But I raise it because it’s probably simple enough to be often overlooked.

2. Actively consider tradeoffs between present and future selves. What choice might bring you closer to your “ideal” self? You might start by asking what aspects of yourself you consider essential or what aspects you’d like to see become essential. Might one path lead you to get closer to this version of yourself? Ashley Whillans, a professor at Harvard Business School, talks about a similar process and asks what your “Big Why is.” Hechtlinger and her co-authors point to Rosa Parks as a classic example of this strategy. On deciding whether to give up her seat, Parks noted, “People always say that I didn’t give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn’t true… No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.”

3. Engage in “minimax inaction regret.” That’s a fancy term for a pretty smart process that could apply in many consequential decision settings. Let’s take an example of getting a tattoo. First, you ask whether getting a tattoo will cause regret at a later point in time. If you anticipate feeling regret, don’t do it. If you don’t anticipate regret, then ask yourself whether you’ll feel regret at not getting a tattoo. If you think you’ll regret not getting the tattoo, then do it. If you anticipate that you won’t regret not doing it, then don’t.

4. Ask others. Despite wanting to see ourselves as unique, there are countless others throughout distant and recent history who have most likely been in our shoes, making similar decisions. And we could always, well, ask them. Of course, this could be accomplished by asking an expert or by directly asking others who have gone through our situations. I maintain that the latter may become increasingly easier with artificial intelligence models that not only map out common writing and language patterns, but also common life paths and the outcomes that go with them.³

One thing that needs to be acknowledged in this whole process is the role of uncertainty. With any decision, there are a host of unknowns that could arise from making or not making the decision, and possibly even more so for the big decisions. That makes maximizing — or opting for the decision with the best possible outcome — almost impossible because we can never truly know all the implications of a particular choice.

So, at some point, when it comes to the biggest decisions, it may make sense to satisfice or opt for the path that’s satisfactory even though it might not be the objectively “best” choice when later viewed in hindsight.

Big, momentous decisions might seem impossible to reduce to a set of strategies. That belief, in my mind, is perhaps based in anxiety about not wanting to jump in. As a really banal example, I often tell my students that business-to-business decisions aren’t whole-cloth different from business-to-consumer decisions: Though more complicated, businesses are, at the end of the day, composed of individual decision-makers making individual decisions that add up on a group level.

In a similar way, life’s big decisions represent considerably more complex versions of life’s smaller decisions. And like the smaller decisions, they can be broken down and tackled in ways that resemble something that looks “rational.”

Whatever the case, how you put this advice into practice — either for yourself or for others (like clients) — could have major consequences for satisfaction with life and happiness.

¹Steven D. Levitt, “Heads or Tails: The Impact of a Coin Toss on Major Life Decisions and Subsequent Happiness,” The Review of Economic Studies 88, No. 1 (January 2021): 378-405.

²Shahar Hechtlinger, Christin Schulze, Christina Leuker, and Ralph Hertwig, “The Psychology of Life’s Most Important Decisions,” American Psychologist (2024).

³Hal Hershfield, “Time Travel: What if You Met Your Future Self?” BBC.com, November 14, 2023.