85% Lean or 15% Fat?

Imagine you are given fifty dollars, and told you have to decide between two options.  In the first option, you can gamble all or nothing for the fifty, and you are told there is a 40 percent chance that you will keep the fifty, and a 60 percent change you will lose everything.  The second option is a sure thing -- trade the Ulysses Grant and you get to keep twenty dollars.
     What would you do?  Most people (62%) go for the safe bet, the sure thing.  Free money is free money, right?
     Now, let's do play the game again -- the game stays exactly the same, except instead of gaining twenty dollars, you are told you will lose thirty dollars.  What would you do?
     Well, reading this, you think, wait, that is exactly the same deal as the first one, why would things be different?  And you would be right.  Except that worded in this way, a significantly fewer people (42%) go for the sure money.  What happened?

This is what psychologists call the framing effect, a well-known characteristic of the human decision making process. It is what makes people much more likely to choose the ground beef labeled 85% lean over the one labeled 15% fat, or choose surgery when the doctor tells us there is 80% chance of recovery as opposed to 20% chance of death.  Retailers do this all the time by emphasizing your savings, versus looking at your spending.  This is why percent off coupons are so tempting, and yet so meaningless.  (All of this is from Jonah Lehrer's book How We Decide.)

Now, the reason why I bring this up...

We've been learning on Sundays about making plans, and choosing wisely. And the key, I think is to remember the correct framing for our decisions.

If our framework is that our future is only about what we do with our choices, that is a scary, risky perspective -- and our tendency will be to choose a more passive, conservative approach toward life.  Our range of choices will be limited by our fears.  We are doomed before we even start.

If on the other hand our framework for our decision-making is about guessing at ("divining") God's choices for us -- one specific, secret, choice that gets us to the end, kind of like a cosmic "choose your own adventure" book -- then you will forever be looking for "signs" rather than exercising/developing godly wisdom.

God wants us to be wise.  And stop looking for short-cuts.  Sometimes the short-cuts will come; but we don't get to demand it, not when wisdom will do.

Read Kevin DeYoung's clear and marvelously concise book on this subject.