Given a series of choices, there is more than one way to frame the possible options. It is always possible to choose between the available items one at a time, or to organize the items into sequences and then choose between different sequences. This will be called local and global choice... Local choice is simple, but it ignores the dynamics that link choice and changes in value. In global choice, the options... reflect the dynamic relationship between choice and changes in value (p. 119).
How do we make decisions? Why do we choose to do the things we do? Psychologists, Heyman explains, distinguish two different kinds of choice, which he calls local choice and global choice. Local choice is a decision made by weighing the current pros and cons as they apply to the present situation, e.g. what do I feel like for dinner tonight? Global choice weighs the decision based on the overall effects of both that decision and the future decisions it will necessitate. I would be tempted to say this is just a fancy psychologist way of talking about short-term and long-term thinking, but I do think it's more than that. Global choice is about more than simply accounting for the aggregate long term effects of a decision; rather, it seeks to identify the true nature of the decision when it is viewed from a perspective that transcends our immediate situation. You might call it a God's eye view. And from that view decisions that we think are one thing can actually reveal themselves to be something very different. An easy way to get this idea: No one decides to get fat, but they do decide to have that piece of cake. And that is the difference. Local thinking chooses the cake because right now we want cake, and right now cake will taste good, and right now cake will have minimal negative effects: it won't make us fat tonight! And yet viewed globally, that decision to eat cake becomes a decision to get fat. And that's the key. More than long term effects, it's about the true identity of the decision. The real nature that emerges over time. What are we really deciding to do?
And that is how we so often fool ourselves. We choose to do something bad not because we are bad or because we intend to choose something bad, but because we're seeing it as something good; we're not seeing its true identity. And in naming it wrong we undermine our own decision process and thereby sow the seeds of our own demise. Then when the unbearable end naturally comes, we recoil and think "this can't be my fault, I never would have chosen this!" True,viewed globally you never would have chosen that, but locally, you did. That is why we need to find a way to be honest with ourselves about what we are really choosing.
As Heyman quotes William James describing those who struggle with alcoholism:
He has made a resolve to reform, but he is now solicited again by the bottle... If he says that it is a case of not wasting good liquor already poured out, or a case of not being churlish and unsociable when in the midst of friends, or a case of learning something at last about a brand of whiskey which he never met before, or a case of celebrating a public holiday, or a case of stimulating himself to a more energetic resolve in favour of abstinence than he has ever yet made, then he is lost. His choice of the wrong name seals his doom. But if, in spite of all the plausible good names with which his thirsty fancy so copiously furnishes him, he unwaveringly clings to the truer bad name and apperceives the case as that of "being a drunkard, being a drunkard, being a drunkard," then his feet are planted on the road to salvation. He saves himself through thinking rightly (p. 131).
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