Why is it so hard for some people to figure out that not making any decison is making a decison?

Because inaction seems less positive than action.

As far as bills go, I’m sure people internally know it to be a decision, else there would be no ’‘justification’’ to come with the non paying of the bill.

As for playing the victim, I think in such a case people just feel sorry for themselves, rather than fail to realize the whole idea of decision. I see what you mean though, but I mean some of the examples you give are so prominent with different subjects which usually outweigh any kind of philosophical or psychological insight about whether or not something could have changed something else. It’s not that they don’t realize it, rather than that their minds are elsewhere at the the time.

They do know, but they don’t want to accept responsibility for it.

@YARNLADY There we go. You’re so damn wise. :)

For the same reason that some of us, including myself, sadly, don’t always understand that remaining silent when we could tell the truth is the same as lying. A lie by omission. Deciding to do something has consequences as much as deciding not to do something can have consequences. The only way any of us learn that is to experience the result of our decision or our failure to decide. As far as paying bills, paying your bills is the right thing to do, not just because not paying them is theft of services but because it is the only way to avoid the negative consequences of not paying your bills. You don’t want your electricity to be cut off, well, you pay your electric bill. I’m not quite sure what you’re getting at here, my dear, most dearest Dutchess III.

Famous thought experiment:

Train is coming and it’s about to hit a family of 5. You see that you could throw a switch and change it to another track with 1 person standing on. Would you throw the switch and let 1 person die instead of the 5?

Most people answer yes to this one. You become involved, but you save a net positive 4 lives. Might not be what people would do in real life, but that’s okay because this is a thought experiment.

Now we give it a twist.

Same situation as before. 5 people about to be hit by a train and for whatever reason you cannot warn them. But this time, there isn’t another track you can switch the train to. But there is a fat dude on the overpass near you. If you pushed him off the bridge the train would stop and the same 5 lives would be saved. Would you push the fat guy over?

Most people say no at this point. Let an ethicist figure out what answer is correct or incorrect. That’s not the point. The point I’m making (in the most round about way possible) is that there is a level of responsibility people are willing to take and one they’re not and Google only knows where the line is in between.

Long rambling answer that doesn’t come close to satisfying the question. Great question, though. Hope this adds to the discourse. I can take no credit for it. I have no idea who authored the thought experiment originally and can’t now recall where I first heard it.

This reminds me of a study.

“One particular hypothetical scenario has become quite the rage in some top psychological journals. It involves a runaway trolley, five helpless people on the track, and a large-framed man looking on from a footbridge. He may or may not be about to tumble to his bloody demise: You get to make the call.

That’s because in this scenario, you are standing on the footbridge, too. You know that if you push the large man off the bridge onto the tracks, his body will stop the trolley before it kills the five people on the tracks. Of course, he will die in the process. So the question is: Is it morally permissible to kill the man in order to save five others?

In surveys, most people (around 85 percent) say they would not push the man to his death.”

That most people say they wouldn’t push the man shows that they feel they could minimize their guilt by “not getting involved.” What our brains have trouble comprehending is that we are inherently involved by being an observer – having seen the situation, we could have caused less death to occur by pushing the man. But pushing the man feels like murder, while doing nothing and allowing the five deaths to occur doesn’t. For some reason.

Edit: Goddamnit, ninja’d! XD

“If you choose
Not to choose
You’ll still have made a choice”
-Rush

They figured it out.

These morality-choice problems have been studied from a biological-psychology perspective as well. For instance, one study described in The Science of Evil was an attempt to locate the moral decision-making centers of the brain. One of the questions asked in the study asked a participant to imagine that they were in a warzone, and there were enemy soldiers storming their village. The participant and the other villagers were hiding while the soldiers were looking for survivors, who they would kill if they find. The participant is told that, while in hiding with the villagers, her infant child begins to cry. Although the participant covers the child’s mouth, the sound is still obvious. The participant is told that, in order to save her life and the life of the other villagers, she must smother her baby.

Some of the participants stated that they would do so, some said that they wouldn’t. Those that wouldn’t had a flair up in the more emotional parts of the brain, whereas those that said they would were eventually able to activate the more logical reasoning parts of the brain to make the decision.

So I think there are two main things interacting here: (1) feelings overpowering reasoning, and (2) a sense of hope in events turning out fine or better regardless of the decision made. Once we make a decision, we know what the outcome will probably be. If we end up wrong, then we’ve acted and things turn out shitty anyway. If we don’t act, however, things could still work out, and if they don’t we didn’t actively do something to push the bad situation to happen.

Actually it’s just a recessive gene,which cannot be passed on after the train has flattened them. As a result of their indecision,they are no longer available to procreate.This form of natural selection ensures good decision making and a proper respect for locomotives. :)

Here is a very good example for your question:

People that receive a traffic citation, while traveling through one state, ignores the violation and does nothing. a few months pass by and there is a knock at your door, in your home state. its a process server giving you notice that your house,car, or assests have been attached(lien), until your traffic citation is paid.

Once a person ignores a traffic citation, the court assumes this to be a plea of guilty and forwards it to a collection agency for collection.

So see, not making a decision, in this situation, is a decision…..whether good or bad.

Its pay me now or pay me later(plus court costs).

Not to decide is to decide. ~ Harvey Cox

It’s just annoying as hell!

We think about making the decision the next day but we never come around to actually making it. As the time passes by we run out of time and we were to caught up in everything else that we didn’t notice the decision has already been long time having to be made.

I have been hatched to beleive that inaction is cowardice. To act or to not, I agree, not acting is a choice. Just hardly the best one.

If you make the wrong decision, you gain a valuble lesson. If you make the right one, Huzzah.

Hope I’ve helped – WhenAllLightDies