Tossing a coin on life-changing decisions leads to better outcomes
LIFE decisions chosen on the outcome of a coin toss leads to people being happier, a study has found.
Researchers found that people who use a coin-flip to rule on an important change in their lives are more likely to follow through with that decision, are more satisfied with that decision, and report a higher overall happiness six months later.
The study found while behavioural economics offers several decisionmaking models, it says little about people’s overall happiness with their choices after they make important resolutions.
As part of the study, Steven Levitt, an economist at the University of Chicago, created a website, called Freakonomics Experiments, where people answered a series of questions such as “Should I move?” or “Should I quit my job?”
Before the coin toss, the participants were encouraged to identify a third party to verify their outcomes. Both the initial coin-flipper and the third parties received a follow-up survey after two months and six months.
Other questions included “Should I propose?”, while users were also invited to create their own questions, in- cluding “Should I get a tattoo?”, “Should I try online dating?” or “Should I rent or buy?”.
One choice, either the affirmative or the negative, was then assigned to heads and the other assigned to tails.
The two-month survey found that participants favoured the status quo, making a change less frequently than they predicted they would before the coin toss.
But at the six-month survey, the bias toward the status quo was gone. And those who were instructed by the coin toss to switch their current position were more likely to make the change, reported that they were substantially happier, and said that they were more likely to make the same decision if they were to choose again.
That was true for virtually every question at both the two and six-month surveys, according to the study. The research team said that the results are “inconsistent” with the conventional theory of choice. In such theory, people who are on the margins should, on average, report equal happiness – regardless of which decision they made.
Prof Levitt said: “Society teaches us ‘quitters never win and winners never quit’, but in reality the data from my experiment suggests we would all be better off if we did more quitting.
“A good rule of thumb in decision making is whenever you cannot decide what you should do, choose the action that represents a change, rather than continuing the status quo.” Making decisions based on the toss of a coin is synonymous with Two-face, a fictional supervillain and adversary of Batman, who is reliant on flipping his signature coin in order to make decisions.
In 2016, Hillary Clinton, the former Democratic presidential nominee, secured victory over Bernie Sanders in six precincts at the Iowa caucus via coin tosses when the votes were too close to decide a clear winner.
Prof Levitt’s findings were published in The Review of Economic Studies, published by Oxford University Press.