There is an over-emphasis on the individual when it comes to responsibility and rationality in decision making. I rarely agree with David Brooks, but I found this paragraph in his op-ed today to hit the nail on the head:

Decision-making — whether it’s taking out a loan or deciding whom to marry — isn’t a coldly rational, self-conscious act. Instead, decision-making is a long chain of processes, most of which happen beneath the level of awareness. We absorb a way of perceiving the world from parents and neighbors. We mimic the behavior around us. Only at the end of the process is there self-conscious oversight.

To be clear, I think David Brooks is correct in his assessment on how we, the general public, make decisions, but that doesn’t mean I like it. I wish the opposite were true; the world would be a better place if decision making were a more rational, logical exercise that happened in higher levels of consciousness. But, using nothing more than my own subjective observations as evidence, it’s not.