Plenty of people are happy for their leaders and bosses to make choices for them, as long as they probably would have made similar choices themselves.  Yet when leaders and bosses don't truly represent the interests of their constituents and employees, nudging can be toxic. 

Nobel prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman, author of the new book Thinking, Fast and Slow, knows more than most about how people make decisions. And we often make them badly. As a rule, Kahneman would advise people to slow down their decision-making whenever possible. 

My research for Dirty Minds: How Our Brains Influence, Love, Sex, and Relationships wasn’t all orgasms in brain scanners.  As I sifted through the scientific literature on love and sex, what I thought was a discussion about romance kept circling back around to decision-making.

Our decisions matter. You don’t need me to tell you that. Of course they matter. It almost seems a tautology, a restatement of the obvious, of the very definition of “decision.” And yet, even though we make decisions at every point in our lives . . .