When we’re presented with a choice, we carefully weigh the alternatives and choose the option that makes the most sense — or do we? Only recently has science begun to unravel how we really make decisions.

In the face of stress or time pressure, or even seemingly unrelated cues, our assessment of situations and the choices we ultimately make can be colored by innate biases, flawed assumptions and prejudices born of personal experience. And we’re clueless about how they influence our judgments. These unconscious processes can lead us to make decisions that, in fact, don’t really make much sense at all.