News, social media, newspapers, advertisements? ...What is decision making?edir?

Have you ever thought about how many moments of decision making we go through in the daily life rush? What should I wear? What should I eat? Should I talk to them? Which coffee should I buy? Should I eat pasta or steak for lunch? Should I change my phone? …

Even though decision making is crucial and brings continuity in our lives it is a laborious process and needs to be avoided according to the working principles of our brain. Wait a second, needs to be avoided?

You read it right. Brain tries to avoid decision making as much as possible. But why? The reason is decision making mechanism and process requires too much time and energy for the brain. If possible, the brain does not want to go into this much trouble and spend so much energy. But despite the brain trying to avoid decision making, it is a vital necessity and a job to be done by the brain.

Since the brain has to do its decision work, it develops methods to protect itself and make the process as easy as possible. Although we cannot go into all the details here, let's talk about the most important parts.

First of all, our brain stays in energy saving mode and acts like a cell membrane to make fewer conscious decisions. In other words, it adopts a selective permeable structure and meticulously chooses the situations and issues that are worth making a decision. The brain even avoids situations that would require it to make nonessential decisions.

Secondly, it tries to facilitate the most necessary thing for itself, namely information gathering, for decision making. Our brain consciously and subconsciously tries to collect information and create datasets to make decisions. For example, when we meet a new person we would like to learn as much as possible such as their job, age, hometown, surroundings, family etc. In fact, we can demand much more depending on the level of relationship we will have with this person (like asking for a CV in job interviews). Our subconscious constantly scans the space to create a dataset. At this point, institutions and organizations that try to shape and facilitate our decision-making by presenting pattern datasets to our brains about what is happening in life, namely society, fashion, country, politics, state, economy, etc. appear.

We give names such as media, news, TV show, promotions to organizations that try to sell these ready-made datasets and reward their efforts by watching advertisements (which is a dataset about products and services) or subscribing.

We ask the organizations, which make these datasets that our brain needs to influence our decisions, not to mislead us by expecting values such as impartiality, ethics, etc. Of course, those who prepare these datasets may not always have good intentions. This is what we call manipulation, and as a result; individuals or societies may be harmed by wrong decisions or may experience great losses altogether.

The stage of creating datasets in decision-making processes, which also plays a vital role in artificial intelligence studies, is indispensable and important for us. Unlike machines, our brains have superior abilities such as comparing and inferencing, as well as the power to integrate past experiences.  Therefore, before making a decision, it is useful to pay attention to the contents of the message, the extent and course of communication of the systems that offer you the dataset. Of course, you need a professional in the field to communicate and design. The wrong dataset does not make the right decisions.

Mustafa SOLMAZ

Communication, Press and Brand Consultant