The link between observation and decision arises quickly: what, concretely, is the use of observing one’s inner states? The most honest answer the Laboratory can offer at this stage fits in a sentence. It does not make decisions better, but it changes when they are made.
Deciding in a state, or deciding about a state
Most decisions are taken within an inner state that goes unexamined: impatience, weariness, a wish to be done with it, a need to be right. The state does not determine the content of the decision, but it often determines its timing.
Observing rarely allows the state to be changed. It allows one to know that it is there. And knowing it is there is often enough to defer by a few hours a judgement that would otherwise have been made under its pressure.
This deferral is the only lever observed, and it is a modest one. It does not improve the judgement; it releases it from a time constraint that had no reason to exist. Many decisions presented as urgent are not: it was the inner state that was.
The gap between the stated reason and the real one
The second observed effect is less comfortable. Revisiting past decisions, one frequently discovers that the justification given was not the actual motive. The motive lay elsewhere, and the reason came afterwards.
There is nothing original in this for psychology. What is more unusual is being able to observe it in oneself at the moment the mechanism operates, rather than months later.
Real-time observation has a particular value here. Reconstructed afterwards, a decision is always rewritten, and memory spontaneously supplies a coherent and flattering version. Recorded during, it keeps its hesitations and its less presentable motives.
The Laboratory has therefore taken to recording, before deciding, the state in which the question arises. Not to justify itself afterwards, but to hold an unretouched trace.
Three situations where the effect is clear
Certain configurations recur often enough to be described. The first is the decision taken at the end of the day, after a succession of minor judgements. It is almost always sharper, more definitive and less nuanced than the same question handled the following morning.
The second is the decision that ends an exchange that has become uncomfortable. The content of the decision then matters less than its function: it serves to get out of the situation. It is frequently maintained afterwards, out of consistency, even though the initial motive has gone.
The third is the decision taken to avoid having to feel something: a disappointment to announce, a disagreement to carry, an expectation to let down. That one is recognisable by a precise sign, the unusual speed with which it was formulated.
What this does not allow
It would be dishonest to suggest that this work improves decisions. The Laboratory’s notes show the opposite on at least one point: lucidity about one’s own state does not prevent deciding under its influence all the same.
One observes the impatience, names it, notes that it pushes towards a ruling, and rules. The gap between seeing and being able is constant, and it is better said than left unsaid.
What observation changes is narrower: it makes the mechanism identifiable afterwards, which allows it to be taken into account next time in the organisation of things, failing mastery in the moment. Many of the useful adjustments concern not the decision itself, but when one puts oneself in a position of having to make it.
A question that goes beyond the individual
This observation opens naturally onto a wider question, one the Laboratory does not address but constantly encounters: if individual decisions are made in this way, what of collective decisions, on which entire institutions depend?
That is the ground of a separate body of work, carried out elsewhere under the name Sageocracy, concerning how a society might decide. The Laboratory keeps to what belongs to its own object: describing what happens, at the scale of one person, at the moment of deciding, as Distinguishing Aspiration from Desire describes.