Why waiting seems sensible

I don't want to start by telling you the loop is foolish. It isn't, and if I said so you'd rightly stop listening. Most of the instincts behind it are sound.

Some decisions do get better with time. A week's wait can bring a fact you couldn't have had before. The firm posts its accounts, a friend who did the course calls you back, the survey on the house arrives. Choosing before a fact like that would be rash.

Some questions answer themselves. The firm stops advertising, or the sofa goes out of stock, and one of your options is gone. People who wait are sometimes spared the choice.

Mistakes are expensive. A two-year course costs real money and a lot of evenings. If you get it wrong, you pay for it. Taking that seriously is a sign of sense, and the people around you who decide everything in ten minutes aren't obviously doing better.

And a wrong move stings more than a missed one, at least at first. Thomas Gilovich and Victoria Husted Medvec reviewed the research on regret in the 1990s and described a pattern over time. In the short term, people regret their actions more. The things they did and wish they hadn't hurt most in the weeks and months afterwards. So your sense that a wrong choice would hurt more than more waiting is accurate, for now. Chapter 7 covers what the same researchers found about the long term.

A psychologist named Christopher Anderson gathered the research on this whole family of behaviour in a review with a title I like, "The psychology of doing nothing". He found four related habits in the studies. People defer choices. They stick with whatever they already have. They prefer a harm that comes from not acting to the same harm from acting. And once they've passed up one good chance, they tend to pass up the next one as well.

In his account, two things drive all four. One is anticipated regret, which means imagining how bad you'd feel if the choice went wrong. The other is what he calls selection difficulty, which is the plain hardness of telling which option is better.

That matches what I think the loop is for. It seems to me to meet four needs, and this list is mine. You want to avoid a mistake. You want to feel sure before you move. You don't want to be the one to blame if it goes badly. And you want to stay free, because while the question is open, every option is still yours.

All four are reasonable. The rest of this book doesn't argue that you should stop wanting them. It argues that the loop doesn't deliver them. You'll make no fewer mistakes by going round again, the sureness doesn't come, and the blame and the freedom turn out differently from how they look. Each of those gets a chapter.