How Do We Decide What We Want?

Researchers find our brains take shortcuts and avoid processing too much information.

Photo by Victoriano Izquierdo on Unsplash

Human brains have finite cognitive capacity despite what many of us want to believe, and that limit is far smaller than what we might imagine. One way this shows up is in decision-making capacity. A common assumption is that making choices is the result of higher cognitive processes, the rational brain sifting all the…