Preface

Abstract

I would rather go down this street and get in a firefight than go back and get blown up by an IED. This thought was resounding, and I would not forget it, I would rather get in a firefight than face an IED. This book is about difficult decisions. It explores the mental conflict that people experience when faced with choices for which all outcomes appear horrendous. It draws on interviews that we conducted with real soldiers1 in real situations and focuses specifically on the impossible choices that they had to make—choices that were vivid and sometimes upsetting for them and yet were part of the experience of war and which have stayed with them throughout their lives. The book is about the internal conflict that they experienced when forced to make “least-worst” decisions. In this book, we discuss the methods we have used (as psychologists) to understand and measure this conflict and when and why it emerges. The book describes the processes that make choice selection so difficult; the psychology of decisional conflict; and the immediate, short-term, and longer term behavioral consequences of experiencing this conflict. Special attention is directed to the concept of “decision inertia”—one of several kinds of “failures to act” in which decision-makers are unable to calculate and/or commit to a least-worst course of action2 (normally because people are so averse to a bad outcome—even if it is the least bad of two or more awful options). Emergency services and law enforcement personnel seem especially prone to the inability to tolerate any bad outcome—the military far less so. In later chapters, we sketch our analysis of why we think soldiers are more tolerant of a least-worst option, and thus less prone to decision inertia. Finally, by reference to many real cases of decisional conflict, as well as by asking readers to consider their own responses to different types of conflict scenarios, we hope to illustrate the fundamental theoretical and practical importance of this concept. And, in no small part, we want to help readers understand what it is really like to be faced with options that no sane individual would willingly choose.

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