Hello, and welcome to Session 2.

In this session, we will look at how you make decisions in real life.

We will also introduce you to some cognitive biases which are common mistakes or errors in thinking that can lead to poor decision making.

As parents and carers, you make many decisions about your child and family each and every day.

Generally speaking, you make decisions to solve a problem or achieve a goal.

You base your thinking on what yo believe is the best way to achieve that goal.

Most of our day-to-day decisions are simple.

They don’t require much thought or effort.

You go to the fridge to get a carrot to snack on.

You don’t put much thought into which carrot.

You just randomly select one.

We also make some decisions based on feelings rather than facts.

These decisions are intuitive.

You don’t give any thought to them.

We simply act.

For example, you might intuitively move a hot cup of tea away from your toddler’s reach while you’re talking to your friend on the phone.

But there will be times when you have to make hard or tough decisions in your life.

You will have to do a lot of thinking, information seeking, and comparing options before you can make an informed decision.

Research shows that in real life, we mainly use two difference ways of thinking: heuristic processing, also known as fast thinking, like picking the carrot from the fridge; or systematic processing also know as slow thinking, like when you buy a car or a house.

Neither fast nor slow thinking is better than the other.

They work together and simply do different things.

You can think and problem solve using either heuristic thinking or systematic thinking depending on the situation and circumstances of the problem or question you need to answer.