How people make the most important decisions in their lives

Transformative life decisions (e.g., migration, career change, divorce) shape individual and societal trajectories, yet most research focuses on small-stakes laboratory choices with Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) samples. Across five studies spanning the UK, the US, India, Nigeria, and Germany, we find that transformative decisions are common experiences, and that people universally rely predominantly on simple strategies associated with outcomes as satisfying as complex deliberation. However, in WEIRD countries, most individuals recommend complex, maximizing strategies to others—an “ideal–reality gap” absent elsewhere—suggesting that maximizing is a culturally specific belief rather than universal behavior. These findings challenge a long tradition of applying laboratory-derived standards to real-world uncertainty and illuminate new ways to help people navigate the most important decisions in their lives.