Do you choose the right battle?

When people face a dilemma, they often choose the easiest option rather than the right battle.  I know my dad (67) is non confrontational.  He will never choose the path where he has to put up a battle with any of his children, instead choosing most of the time in life to nurture, educate and inform.  I suspect sometimes he is much better at this than I am.  And my mum competes terribly with her own sister, sometimes to the detriment of both their relationship.  It seems choosing the right battle is very important in getting by.

The age-old saying of ‘choose your battles’ is engrained in our childhood and practiced throughout our adult lives. But do we choose the right battles?

A BBC Radio 4 interview with Professor Nick Chater, of Warwick Business School, revealed that experiments show that people often choose the easiest option rather than the right battle when faced with a dilemma.

According to Professor Chater, “The metaphor of life as a competition is familiar and powerful,” and that life is filled with multiple competitions. For example, people compete in areas like academics, relationships, sports, and workplaces.

However, he also adds, “There are so many we can’t compete in them all, so we have to choose our battles. Yet when it comes to choosing, we aren’t very good at it.”

“There are a lot of experiments where people are given an easy or difficult task; typically it is general knowledge questions. When given the easy task they think they have done well, but when given the hard task they think they have done badly. But in comparison to others they might have done well. So people typically choose the easy task as the one they want to be measured on, but you don’t know how you compare to others. What you really need to do is compare yourself to other people.

An example of a simple experiment was one that included two participants who distributed their counters into four boxes. One person had more counters than the other. A box was chosen and whoever had the most counters in this box was the winner. The participant with fewer counters was more likely to put all of their counters into one box to make sure they’d win if that box was chosen. This relates to the idea that weaker individuals resort to specialization because they cannot compete.

Professor Chater says that these actions are found in everyday life.

“A younger sibling may feel it is hopeless to compete with an older sibling’s academic successes and decide to concentrate on sport or music. A danger we always face is choosing to compete on things that ‘feel’ easy, but of course many other people will fall into this trap too! So the apparently easy options (for example, becoming a successful novelist rather than a successful quantum physicist) may turn out to be the most crowded: what appears the easy route, in fact turns out to be the hard option.”

Do you feel like you take the easy way out? Have you ever felt like you were competing with a sibling?