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About This Issue
Circuitous Minds and Hearts
By Kathleen O'Toole, Editor
The three of us went shopping together for his final valentine. Would our father’s casket be oak or cherry wood? Should his wake include a rosary or Scripture readings?
As we sat in the funeral home surrounded by the accoutrements of a proper funeral and burial, I was trying to gauge whether Protestants would outnumber Catholics at the wake. Would a rosary service distance our dad’s Lutheran and Methodist neighbors from the Catholics at a time we hoped they would share memories? Would the Catholics of his generation be offended if we didn’t say a rosary?
“A rosary,” my brother said, ending his deliberation very quickly. “Dad was traditional. We should have a rosary.”
Ah, yes. I remembered Dad telling us once that he prayed the rosary three times a day when he was trying to persuade our mother to marry him. But that was 1945, and this is 2007 when ecumenism is more accepted.
And so it went—my brother making quick choices from his gut; my sister and I trying to weigh all the angles. For two weeks after my father’s death, she and I were heavily engaged in the assigned tasks that accompany a family member’s death. My brother helped too, but his approach was different. He wanted, for instance, to have a farmer’s cap placed on Dad’s head before the casket was closed. At the time he mentioned this, I was trying to decide if we needed more than one roll of postage stamps for thank-you cards.
In this issue of the magazine, we have many articles that deal with styles of decision making. The death of a loved one might seem like a context in which everyone’s visceral emotion would trump deliberate analysis, but I found the opposite to be the case for me. The rituals involved in a death, like a wedding, seemed to demand attention to the rules of etiquette and custom. It would be several weeks before I allowed myself to “feel” my loss, just as it had been when Mother died.
How people make decisions is the primary focus of research by marketing Professor Baba Shiv, whose counterintuitive findings are featured in this issue. We also have research by marketing Professor Uzma Khan on shopping as a two-stage decision-making process, and finance Professors Peter DeMarzo and Ilan Kremer show how economic bubbles take on hot air from perfectly “rational” decision makers investing in risky long-shots. No decision is more complicated, however, than choosing a life partner who must also choose you. Our article on online dating websites provides perspectives on why algorithms have become decision aides to customers of these matchmaking companies.
If all this decision talk leaves your head spinning, consider Baba Shiv’s insight that most decisions are not objectively right or wrong. If you are satisfied with your choice, it was a good decision.
Whether Dad’s decision to pray rosaries helped his courtship or not, Mother eventually decided to marry him. Unwittingly she picked the first day of hunting season for the wedding. Dad later explained his decision not to point out her social flub: “I went hunting ducks that morning, but I got to the church on time,” he said. “It was the best decision I ever made.”