Decision Making

In the Wuthering Heights movie, Cathy is faced with a dilemma that is not quite uncommon. Follow her heart and marry heathcliff and face a probable life of poverty or follow her brain and marry into a much richer family. As it turns out she follows her brain and does not like the decision at all.

The most successful decisions lie somewhere in between where you follow your heart but not blindly. If your heart says that you want to be a model but you are very short and the odds are stacked against you and you are probably not going to make it. Most heart based decisions need some kind of reality check using your rational mind or “brain”. However these heart based decisions or “intuitions” are very important. They hint at you what outcomes will give you the utmost joy. So its important to be able to record them or listen to them and them guide or project them onto the manifold of reality which is usually made up of your skills, talents, background and experiences.

All children have is intuition because they dont have a well developed reasoning based brain yet. They also dont have many experiences so their model of reality is very limited. So children’s responses to “what they want to become when they get older” are based on the limited data they have and their intuitions and no reasoning. Getting older is the process of aligning your intuitions with reality through your improved model of the world and better brain reasoning. On the other hand children are really good at listening to their intuitions which is the ability adults seem to lack when they get older.

Perhaps this is also in line with Daniel Kahneman’s System 1 vs System 2 thinking where he presents all kinds of biases that the human brain is plagued with and strongly endorses System 2 thinking to overcome these biases and make good long term decisions.

In the movie, Cathy does realise her unsatisfactory outcome but due to a series of events (mainly because of the Nelly character) is never able to correct it. This is mainly a movie gimmick where all the characters acted incredibly stupid. In real life however despite your best efforts if you find yourself in a a very unsatisfactory outcome, you are able to backtrack and correct your decision most of the time. Albeit at the cost of some money, time and energy.

In summary, listen to your intuitions, align them with the reality with good System 2 reasoning and then give it your best shot, if it still doesnt work out you can always try and backtrack and correct your decision.