BBC News Online has done one of it’s promotion features where you don’t realise it’s a promo to the end – but then it also promotes so much that you no longer need to see the real thing. This one is about the way we really make decisions:

Our thinking is riddled with systematic mistakes known to psychologists as cognitive biases. And they affect everything we do. They make us spend impulsively, be overly influenced by what other people think. They affect our beliefs, our opinions, and our decisions, and we have no idea it is happening. It may seem hard to believe, but that’s because your logical, slow mind is a master at inventing a cover story. Most of the beliefs or opinions you have come from an automatic response. But then your logical mind invents a reason why you think or believe something.

Toby Macdonald, Producer, Horizon

I think I like that. The idea that we compulsively decide on something and then our brains conjure up a great post-rationalisation, it feels like it speaks to all sides of our noggins.

Macdonald writes much more and presumably then the Horizon episode How You Really Make Decisions shows us more still tonight, Monday 24 February, 2014 at 21:00. That Horizon link is to a webpage that has a clip now and will hold the whole episode later – if you’re reading it in the UK.