By Chris Charyk
The pros-and-cons list enjoys a long and storied history, going back at least as far as 1772, when Benjamin Franklin advised his friend and fellow scientist Joseph Priestley to “divide half a sheet of paper by a line into two columns, writing over the one Pro, and over the other Con.” But how useful is a pros-and-cons list, really?
THE PROS
- Thinking through all the pros and cons of a given course of action, and then capturing them in writing, minimizes the likelihood that critical factors will be missed.
- Emotional distance. Important decisions are likely to evoke powerful emotions. Creating a pros-and-cons list can elicit what researchers Ozlem Ayduk and Ethan Kross call a “self-distanced perspective”, in which the decision is viewed as an “external” problem to be addressed, easing the impact of the emotions surrounding it.
- Familiarity and simplicity. Making a pros-and-cons list requires no special computational or analytical expertise and is elegantly simple to administer.
THE CONS
Cognitive biases are common patterns of thinking that lead to errors in judgment and poor decision-making. The same simplicity that makes a pros-and-cons list so appealing creates many opportunities for a host of cognitive biases to emerge, including:
- The framing effect. Pros-and-cons lists generally are about evaluating two alternatives. Thumbs-up or thumbs-down scenarios like these are examples of “narrow framing”, a bias created by overly constraining the set of possible outcomes.
- One cognitive bias is the tendency of individuals to overestimate the reliability of their judgments. It’s likely that many people assume a level of accuracy in their assessments of pros and cons that simply isn’t there.
- The illusion of control. A common bias is to believe that one can control outcomes that in reality are uncontrollable.
- A reliance on analytical thinking. In one study, the “absence of attentive deliberation,” a.k.a. “going with your gut,” led to better outcomes than those derived from the use of analytical tools.
THE VERDICT
For critical decisions, a pros-and-cons list is useful only as a preliminary thinking aid.
Chris Charyk is an executive coach with The Boda Group.