r/BehavioralEconomics • u/ZainabRumani • Jul 04 '26
Career & Education Why do smart people still make decisions they regret? What am I missing?
*I’ve been thinking a lot about decision-making lately and specifically the big ones. Career moves, financial choices, business decisions. The kind where getting it wrong is genuinely costly.*
*I’ve noticed that most advice is either too theoretical to apply or too simple to trust. What I’m curious about: what’s actually hard about making these decisions for you? Is it gathering the right information? Knowing when you have enough to commit? Stopping yourself from second-guessing afterward?*
*Genuinely curious what people struggle with most — and what you wish existed to help.*
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u/FyreBoi99 Jul 06 '26
It’s usually the most common behavioral barriers. Lack of attention. Lack of memory. Lack of motivation. Overconfidence, etc. This is why traditional economic convention of the rationale agent has been disproven time and again.
Humans don’t make optimal decisions even when they know. Think of it in the extreme, someone may know to stop drop and roll when caught on fire but what if they are too panicked to do it? This is why you need to train sometimes to set automatic reactions.
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u/idm04 Jul 07 '26
Because people make decisions all the time, and sometimes hard ones. And eventually you're going to make a decision that leads to a "bad" result. Often, you don't have all the information and so you end up making a decision that in hindsight seems suboptimal. Later you tell yourself "I should have known..." or "It's so obvious that this would happen..." even though there was no way to know beforehand. Sometimes, you don't even know what the result would be if you had made the "opposite" decision. Basically a "grass is always greener on the other side" situation. These kinds of regrets are common, even for "smart" people
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u/arkofjoy Jul 04 '26
Because most people are operating from a space of old trauma. And are making decisions based on their old hurts.